#PAINT BUTT AND SIT ON CANVAS SKIN#

The more interesting failure is when the painting turns against you. There are certain predictable failures, like things that are a bit ugly. The moment you can have a standard conversation like that, failure moves further away. TR: I think the idea of the “beauty of failure” is almost becoming a standard conversation in painting. JS: What kinds of failures were you talking about?

#PAINT BUTT AND SIT ON CANVAS SKIN#

Tal R, “L’Evasion” (2015), pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 78 3/4 x 67 3/4 inches If you don’t have necessity, but instead have only strategies, you end up just doing experiments. If you know what you want to do, then a lot of mistakes - a lot of spelling mistakes, a lot of dyslexic mistakes - will be okay, because there is necessity. When I was in my mid-twenties, I realized that I wanted art to be about necessity. You find the way to work with necessity again. It sounds brutal, but there is no direct link between being a child and becoming an artist. In the process of becoming an artist, there is a child world that needs to be destroyed. From the age of eighteen to twenty-eight, I had to work my way back into something I could appreciate. I think they were right, but everything to do with drawing left me, and it was very painful. I had to reflect on things outside myself. In art school, I was told that it was not enough to sit and draw what felt necessary for me to draw. However, that logic is like deciding that if you had been baking chocolate chip cookies with your mom your whole life, you should be a baker.

It seemed logical to say, “I want to go to art school,” because I had been drawing my whole life. When I was eighteen, I wanted to escape high school, so I needed to tell my parents what I was going to do instead. TR: When I grew up, there were no computer games, so you would always have children drawing in school. JS: I read that when you went to art school, you suddenly stopped drawing. Jennifer Samet: You were born in Tel Aviv and grew up in Copenhagen. In May 2017, he will be the subject of a major exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, curated by Anders Kold. Recent solo exhibitions include: Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2008) Camden Arts Centre, London (2008) Cheim & Read, New York (2012, 2015), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2012) Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paolo (2012) Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2011, 2015), and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2015, 2016). He lives and works in Copenhagen, and from 2005–2014 held a Professorship at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was born Tal Rosenzweig in 1967 in Tel Aviv to a Jewish father and Danish mother, and raised in Denmark from the age of one. The sex clubs, as subject matter, echo these delicious contradictions in terms - they are playful, malevolent, superficially banal, and elusive. He uses pigment and rabbit skin glue as his medium. There is whimsical, bright Fauvist color, but also an abundance of black. He has a way of mixing the highly charged and the quotidian in a way that makes you question what the work is really about. His previous body of work, exhibited in 2015 at Cheim & Read, stemmed from his inviting strangers and acquaintances to pose in hotel rooms, where he drew them from life. He photographed red-light districts, and asked friends in other cities to do the same. The current show, entitled Keyhole, is comprised of paintings and drawings based on the façades of sex clubs and porn shops. He’s unafraid to play, test, steal, and work from all kinds of sources, in all directions. His approach poses the rhetorical question, “Is it possible to do this?” - technically, socially, and in the context of today’s art world. He has worked across media and with collaborators, such as the German performance artist Jonathan Meese, clothing and furniture designers, and students. This kind of alert, energized openness characterizes Tal’s work and process. The experience of looking with him was like sitting at a sidewalk bus stop - both of us focused out in the same direction - while he dropped one challenging pronouncement after another. It might be a language tic, but it also feels specific. Tal talks about “watching” paintings - not just looking at them. While the rooms were still quiet, we sat on the gallery bench and looked at his work together. The Danish painter Tal R and I met at his gallery, Cheim & Read, the day after the opening of his solo exhibition. Tal R, “Cabaret Closed” (2016), pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 78 3/4 x 98 1/2 inches (all images courtesy Cheim & Read)

Paint butt and sit on canvas