The art of Tal R, a Danish painter and environmental artist, defies concepts and definition. His work tests the viewers' desire to recognise objects and things. Tal R's works are rich in themes that remotely remind one of something - but one cannot tell exactly what. Born in Israel in 1967, Tal R takes his themes from everyday life. He does not follow the traditions of art history too strictly and according to his own words, he rarely goes to art museums. His inspiration comes from the diversity of the world around him. Television programmes, horror films, home decoration objects and encounters with neighbours all find their way into his art. He collects in his plastic bags discarded stuff produced by the consumer culture, and gives it a new lease on life as part of an artwork. In art literature Tal R has been treated more as a DJ or a 'soup man' rather than a painter in the traditional sense. He throws together ingredients from here and there and aims to achieve a good mix. In his experimental cuisine, a childlike 'finger-paint' method is often used to season shocking meanings and hidden pictures.hematically borrowing from avant-garde assemblage drawings, Tal R swaps violins, Paris café tables and newspaper clippings for rock'n'roll guitars, anthem-coloured paint and hefty sheets of canvas. Arranged in a spiralling vortex, his collage has a folksy, hippy-trippy feel about it; a crafty flashback to the sixties. Tal R paints a communal kind of abstraction, as infinitely groovy and commercial as a Beatles box set. Tal R's continuous use of a solid band across the bottom of his paintings gives citation to the framing of TV screens; the space above becomes an interchangeable place for action, where images can be substituted like channel surfing. In Fungusia, Tal R imports a trippy spiral of magic mushrooms. Hypnotically mesmerising, his suggestive forms and putrid colours play dizzying tricks of perspective, oozing sickly in their phallic reference.

Tal R at his most minimal. His rough-crafted geometric portal to a kingdom is comically absurd, but only because he's mastered a visual alchemy. He disturbs space with opposing forces of colour perspective. Blue advances and black recedes, Tal R's tunnel seems to define itself in neither one place nor the other, but instead fits into a dimension of its own.Tal R humorously depicts his process of artistic creation. Drawing tongue-in-cheek reference to Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, Tal R's earth mother is the opposite of sexual: simply a giant pair of cartoon-ish legs, she perversely spurts out one masterpiece after the next. Surrounded by the grotesque totems of her making, they dumbly stare in bleak confrontation. The chequered pattern of the bed suggests the conceptual stratagem of chess.Tal R merges the stylised primitivism of the avant-garde with his own contemporary lexicon of suburban culture. Inspired by the psychedelia of 60's album covers, Tal R's Cream 13 portrays all the accoutrements of rock and roll sin with a ham-fisted approximation of Picasso. Use of low art materials, such as biro pen and cut and paste, lends a degenerate feel to this high art reference, trapping the drawing between teenage doodle and masterpiece.