Tal R
The Sum
20.01.08 - 20.04.08
'I constantly have this hot-pot boiling and I throw all kinds of material into it' Tal R
His naïve painting is disarming and suggests the candid attitude and 'simple' perceptions we associate with children, autodidacts, amateurs and other 'outsiders'. Tal R's energetic style is reminiscent of their decorative impulse and narrative approach, of their schematic, two-dimensional representation of the world and of their abundance of bright colours and shapes. For the exhibition project The Sum, Tal R challenged himself by choosing only seven colours as the basis for a series of eighteen paintings (2004 – 2007) of equal dimensions (250x250cm). Besides these, the exhibition contains a complete retrospective of his graphic work from the period 1996 -2007 and seven display cases filled with material from his atelier.
Lords of Kolbojnik was the title of Tal R's first solo exhibition in London, where the Danish painter (Tel Aviv 1967, raised in Copenhagen) made his international breakthrough in 2003. Kolbojnik is Yiddish for communal waste. Tal R(osenzweig) likes to present himself as a not-too-fussy artist who is satisfied with recycling the visual remains of human society. "We are anyway just little pieces in the greater whole", says the artist. "90% of our personality is made up of things put into us by other people". This frankness and sense of perspective is reflected in Tal R's naïve style of painting, tending towards folk art, in a disarming and 'simple' visual language.
Melting-pot primitivism
However, Tal R's primitivism has something that is notoriously lacking in most outsider art; i.e. it is brazen, swinging, inventive and refined. In his large, robust paintings and collages, the artist imperceptibly fuses his naïve idiom with modern graffiti, comic strip and underground culture. The overwhelming diversity – apparently selected at random – of references to art-historical, sexual and religious sources betray an informed and well-read creator who is a 'jack-of-all-trades'. Fellow countryman and CoBrA predecessor Asger Jorn (1914-1973) is, of course, never far away. But with his accessible melting-pot primitivism, Tal R appears primarily to be a self-aware metroman reincarnation of our own cool "I just mess around" Karel Appel. On the understanding that the artist keeps a grip of iron on his irresistible Danish hot-pot painting with tight composition schemes, strong patches of colour and ornamental frames.
European tour
The exhibition The Sum started off in September 2007 in the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, and it is Tal R's first big European tour. After the Bonnefantenmuseum, The Sum will travel on to the Camden Arts Centre in London. A special catalogue has been compiled in cooperation with Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk and the Camden Arts Centre, London (ISBN: 978-87-91607-01-1, English-language €30).
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