Tal R at Zach Feuer

Tal R applies paint with sloppy authority. He smears, trowels and squeezes massive quantities of thick oil color straight out of the tube to depict scenes associated with the life of an artist. Art School, Drawing Room and Model Alone in Studio (all works 2006) are large, decorative paintings that schematically represent the architecture of art-making along with a few objects, like bottles or tables, belonging to those spaces. An Israeli-born Dane, Tal R shares with many modern artists, from Picasso to Pollock, an enthusiasm for the simplicity, directness and innocent vitality of children's art. But in contrast to those unschooled qualities, the title of this exhibition, "Le peintre n'est pas la" (The Painter Isn't There), suggests a more detached, French-style death-of-the-author conceit. Is "Tal R" a role the artist has created to question authenticity, or is he just saying that he didn't depict himself? Each work includes a bold signature that strenuously exercises a time-honored claim of authority and dominion, even as that claim is questioned by the exhibition's title.

The Model is a hailstorm of variously sized and colored spots intended to be an extreme close-up of Model Alone in Studio. Zooming in on the The Model reveals a very dense paint crust embedded with blob-shapes cut out of paper. These clunky and oversized pixel-dots make a joke about reproduction-based painting while appearing to be a jaunty and intuitive abstraction. Model Alone in Studio features a nude woman crudely drawn in charcoal directly onto the white ground, augmented by gooey paint lines squeezed from the tube. A dark green cow-pie of paint describes the model's left nipple while a smaller cadmium one describes her right. She's a snout-nosed muse who takes her role seriously, even if we wonder how seriously Tal R takes her.

Tal R's tone is exuberant and festive. He paints a wide and elaborately ornamented frame around each picture to honor its contents. Elements from the interior of Drawing Room are ingeniously lined up to parade around its perimeter. Frame and picture coexist in an amplified world of spontaneous make-believe; Tal R's pictures are hyperbolic like children's theater. In some paintings the frame takes over the whole picture to become an uncomplicated pattern of marks. Inn and Innn are made entirely of red, orange and green triangles, circles and dots arranged symmetrically and concentrically.

Tal R doesn't want us to forget that his artworks come here from elsewhere. He might be hiding out in his studio but other artists are probably with him. His paintings celebrate the artist as a member of a utopian tribe in which the worthless is valuable, the ridiculous is taken seriously, jokes are the only imperative and drinking will happen, n'est-ce pas?

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning