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  • Tal R

  • Until Jun 29
    • Recommended
  • This event has finished
  • Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Rd, London, NW3 6DG
  • Rating:
  • Camden Arts Centre

    'Name, Year and Departure', 2007

  • By Tony Pearson

    Posted: Tue Jun 10

  • I had a good time with a couple of large wines and some cake in the Centre’s garden reading the catalogue, preparing mentally for a rigorous analytical stroll around Gallery One full of paintings and Gallery Two full of etchings, 200 of them. Apart from the press release’s sentence, ‘The exuberant surfaces hide the seriousness of their content,’ and the ill-advised list of recommended music (Cat Power, Will Oldham and ‘anything sad or sexy played on an organ’), I felt positive about what I was about to view, and carried this bias into the gallery. My eyes were easily seduced by an orderly hanging of 17 two-and-a-half-metre-squared canvases, nice and big, nice and colourful, loads of oil, sometimes a whole tube squeezed out just to write the artist’s name or the date and some curious details like Hitler reading a paper and some Gormleyesque figures in Philip Guston pinks and browns.

    Tal R limits himself to seven colours, and uses them mostly unmixed, creating an outsider or African wall-rug look. ‘Dirty Minimalism’ say the notes; I’d call it ‘Indie Primitivism’. But there’s something fishy going on, something’s not quite right; that word ‘hide’ in the notes… and his confession to being a liar… ‘Disguise’ would have been all right, but a thing ‘hidden’ in painting is a thing which therefore doesn’t exist. This all confirms a feeling that the paintings don’t really have much substance. You’ve been duped!

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