File Note 29: Tal R

It is easy to dismiss Tal R’s paintings, which are grubby, casual and intimate in an off-hand way. ‘Dirty minimalism’ is how he has described his style, and it is as good an epithet as any. Tal likes to scavenge along the frontiers and boundaries of our times, rummaging though cultural detritus to see if there is anything of interest that he can recycle or make his own. There is something abject and provocative about this kind of slumming, as he well knows, but he carries it off with great charm.

Tal, I’m convinced, is the real deal. I’ve worked with him twice, hope to collaborate again, and I’ve had dozens of engaging conversations with him. Many of them were full of perceptive insights on his part, which rather took me aback. And he taught me a thing or two about the richness of ambivalence. Tal is the only person I know, apart from Christian Boltanski, who will tell you truthfully that he is lying and can still manage to be both revealing and honest.

Over the course of our friendship Tal and I have swapped music and books. I introduced him to the ruminative novels of W.G. Sebald; he told me about Cat Power’s melancholic version of Satisfaction. There is a clue to his sensibility here, and another in the comparison to Boltanski. What Tal doesn’t talk about, and what his work doesn’t directly reveal, is the sadness that influences his work. He’ll usually change the subject if you refer to such things, but there can be deep feeling in his paintings, sensible somewhere between the joints and the cracks.

When you are painting, what goes on in your mind; do you ponder and make conscious decisions, or would you describe it more as a subconscious or intuitive process? Timo Heikkila, friend
— At one time, I use to think of the process of doing a painting as the search for a point of authority, so that a painting achieves it’s own authority.
But today is Thursday evening and I prefer a more romantic explanation. To make a painting is to search for the heart. The bitter search of the heart, for me, always starts as a response to something I see. It may be an image — something like tree-men riding towards a peculiar house. Secretly embarrassingly, I am not interesting and secretly embarrassingly the horse-riders are not interesting either.
So my only friend in the desert is to lean one hundred percent towards the response — to go for the heart of the response. In this game, there isn’t time and I don’t have the patience to ask for reasons. The painting searches for the little tolerated, but grand point, of no discussion. I used to be picky in my choice of motives. Only certain kind of images were considered useable. But more and more, I lose all stupid education and now very few motifs are un-useable.

What is the difference between good and bad art? Christoph Ruckhäberle, artist
— Good art has a tendency to make people quiet. Good art challenges and seduces you to listen to something you don’t understand. Good art is always in the valley and outside the valley at the same time. Good art arises from somewhere deeply subjective, but finishes objectively. Good art will break the afore mentioned rules.

What is the funniest story you know? Adam Gillam, artist
— Sigmund Freud’s Der Wolfsmann.