While spring has just about sprung in London, at Victoria Miro’s Mayfair gallery you’re invited to fast-forward to the long lazy days of late summer. Danish late summer, to be precise. Tal R, painter, sculptor, all-round magician of line, colour and form, has a holiday home in the rural north of the country. He calls it a ‘weird old summerhouse’ but it looks pretty charming in a photograph in the exhibition catalogue. Last year, the artist made a series of paintings by stepping out of his front door every day and, armed with paint and small panels of wood, sheets of paper or canvas, noting down what he saw. Nothing special about that, you might think (even though painting en plein air in the twenty-first century seems almost radical). But the results are uniquely bewitching.
First off, for colour fanatics this is a Fauvist jewellery box of a show. Often reduced to a few blocks, lines or squiggles of paint on brightly-hued backgrounds, the images sing with a chromatic intensity you rarely see in contemporary painting. The almost ruthless act of distilling each scene has sharpened the eye of a brilliant colourist. Hastily-limned three-dimensional forms – a pile of logs, a heavy branch – become abbreviated, flattened, pulled to towards pure painting but still readable as things.
Tal R’s work has always operated between poles – of idea and image, thought and action – and he’s always been generous in taking you with him and ensuring that you enjoy the journey. There’s a narrowing of focus here but it hints at wider truths, universal laws and eternal mysteries. Knowing the works were made in the far north of Denmark during summer’s finale makes them seem somehow more urgent. The motifs – the fallen tree, the fork in the road, the Heideggerian clearing in the forest – are similarly loaded. And then there’s the Hare Hill of the title. It’s a destination alluded to but never arrived at, which seems like a distillation of the creative process itself.
Martin Coomer