PARIS.- VNH Gallery opened the solo exhibition by Tal R, entitled “Pink Road Through Forest” (12 March - 27 April 2019) comprising a body of works mounted around an inspirational art brut painting the artist came upon a few years ago.

Visual theory takes the idea that the viewer participates in the image thus it is built through a communicative form of art. Using a great variety of mediums from sculpture and paintings to drawings or textile, Tal R adds this intricacy in his works by indeed questioning our conceptions and presumptions of our surrounding reality which frustrates the extraction of a coherent worldview.

First known for flamboyant colors and expansive imagery paintings, Tal R plants various strategic challenges to the viewer’s education such as the knowledge of perspective and reflection, defying the narrative solely based on what we know and what we see. From an image encountered two years ago, Tal R mounted an exhibition around the pursuit of a spiritual path each one of us needs to find, illustrated by a pink road crossing a forest.

When entering the gallery, the visitor is first stroke by the immense fabric piece standing up in the middle of the room. Built as a patchwork of textiles, this work stands as a pink wall to dominate before entering the main space where a second obstacle awaits. Indeed, bending is required in order to enter the glass skylight room as a wooden plinth drastically shortens the entrance’s height.

Presented chronologically, the paintings here shown all depict a pink field cutting the canvas in two and sometimes morphing into an internal frame and containing the image inside a rectangular border, connecting the bottom and the top of the canvas. While crossing a forest which progressively fades away from image to language as it transforms into symbols, the pink road would really represent a spiritual road each one has to find in order to find our way through the forest the character depicted in the black and white drawings struggles so much going through, disappearing into it every time he tries.

At the center of the room thrones a large pedestal where eighty-three lino prints produced over a year and a half are described by the artist as surgery works somewhere between image and language, mirroring the symbols moving through the paintings, making them differ from their initial narrative by crawling into language.
For Tal R, this exhibition was mounted as a journey the viewer must go through in order to find your own mythical pink road, arguing the price for such a reward is quite reasonable when reaching the possibility of such a path is one of the most hazardous challenges of all.

Tal R was born in 1967 in Tel Aviv (Israel). He currently lives and works in Copenhagen (Denmark).