Lot 553 D

„Tal R himself has said that he often starts painting his pictures with the same precision as a teenager applying lipstick or eye-shadow before going to a party. But sometimes the picture gets stuck or takes a different turn, just as a party that starts innocently enough can suddenly turn nasty. The Sombi Club is not spelled with a Z, which is why we can still escape from this dream, simply by waking up. But just as Matisse's palette of colors, already abused by both Baselitz and Förg, degenerates into a swamp or brackish water, so some subjects of pictures turn out to be dangerously incalculable. Vegetable forms mutate into meat-eating plants. The Beatles become menacing zombies whose faces are covered in hair, domino bricks are used to build dungeons, and ghosts fly through the air like stray notes from the score.
The color of horror is not black, but white - the white underlying all Tal R's objects, the white as backdrop to his macabre little drawings or which he crisscrosses with pasty lines that like Crqaquelé or broken milk-glass develop counter compositions of their own.” (Veit Loers, Slutspil, in: Veit Loers (ed.), Tal R, fruitland, exh.cat. Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Cologne 2002, n.pag.)