Tal R: How to Count to Tree

Tal R often employs apparently simple compositional devices and motifs from everyday life to create complex, atmospheric worlds that, beginning with the recognisable and known, expand or collapse into spaces of enchantment or ambiguity, heady with atmosphere and colour. The works in this exhibition are the result of an extended consideration of a clearing in a Danish forest. A curious, eye-shaped space created by felled trees, it compelled the artist to make a series of drawings en plein air, which he later worked into larger works on paper and paintings in his studio. The paintings on view here further distil this experience, bringing into play what Tal R describes as ‘artist’s mathematics’ while criss-crossing the boundaries between depiction and invention, life and art, looking and really seeing.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by Martin Herbert, who writes, ‘The first thing one might notice about these works is that they are modestly scaled, the landscapes in them hemmed in still further, almost comically, by internal “frames” made of wooden beading. Outside of these is a generous edge zone speckled with capitalised language, except that Tal R long ago began vexing the hierarchical distinction between frame and painting, and implicitly between interiority and exteriority, feeling and thing. The format recalls the locale that gestated the paintings themselves, a gap in the forest; a chance invitation to concentrate sustainedly on one corner of the world, or even a corner of this corner… Within such purposively constricted views… the operative gambits seem to be: how much world can fit in one little space? How large can that space feel? And how do you render this place – its forest-ness, tree-ness, clearing-ness – via the synecdoche, the part?’