Tal R's paintings are derived from his everyday life; imaginary scenes suggest awkward and puerile narratives of suburban fairytale. Inspired by music, comics, TV and nostalgic video game graphics, more than Picasso, Matisse, and Albers, Tal R appropriates painting for his own means. Personalising tradition, his work acts as a celebration of making, creativity, and 'hands on' ingenuity. A return to art for art's sake, his paintings revive the long-dead values of autonomy and expression.
Tal R's paintings have a hippy-trippy feel about them, a crafty flash-back to the 60's. Wilfully child-like, his work is infused with a bygone esteem of innocence, often incongruous with the sophistication of his adult subject matter. Permeated with dark undertones, Tal R's home-brew designs and clumsy ham-fisted depictions evoke a sense of lost beguilement.
Striving to recapture a validity of play, Tal R creates a world absorbed in adolescent confusion: occultish drawings of graveyards, paintings of sexless block-headed figures, and giant magic mushrooms are portrayed with convincing chastity. Remixing socialist aesthetic with consumer culture ethic, his large collages burst with hundreds of tiny clipped figures and consumer ephemera. From nazi soldiers to gay porn stars, cartoon animals and chintz furniture: his primitive totems are monuments to catalogue cut-out homology.
Tal R injects painting with fresh invigoration. Shunning hierarchies and intellectualism, he uses painting for its most genuine purpose: spontaneous and unarbitrated conveyance of his experience of the world around him. Propagating a softer, cuddlier avant garde, where all things having achieved logo-istic equality, he resurrects the almost forgotten concept of artistic genius.
Portuguese
Spanish
French