| Tal R’s exhibit Adieu Interessant was featured at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in Berlin as part of the German capital’s citywide gallery weekend this past May. The Israeli-born Danish artist displayed ten large-format collages on two floors of the David Chipperfield designed space. The canvases in Adieu Interessant resembled abstract compositions from afar, two-dimensional images that staged a three-dimensional effect by presenting focused lines that collapsed into a central point. Close up, however, the detailed magazine images emerged: strings of thread, a young Britney Spears in Sketchers sneakers, women in variously faded pornographic poses. The crinkled foil and the sequins collected along the edge of each frame served as tangible pop-art debris. | 
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Tal R retools the process of collage in his recent Berlin exhibit.
Tal R’s exhibit Adieu Interessant was featured at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in Berlin as part of the German capital’s citywide gallery weekend this past May. The Israeli-born Danish artist displayed ten large-format collages on two floors of the David Chipperfield designed space. The canvases in Adieu Interessant resembled abstract compositions from afar, two-dimensional images that staged a three-dimensional effect by presenting focused lines that collapsed into a central point. Close up, however, the detailed magazine images emerged: strings of thread, a young Britney Spears in Sketchers sneakers, women in variously faded pornographic poses. The crinkled foil and the sequins collected along the edge of each frame served as tangible pop-art debris. Thin strings stretched tightly across some of the canvases in the series formed a network of triangulated lines that directed the viewer’s gaze toward the center of each piece.
Studied examination is required to unpack the layers of each piece in Adieu Interessant. Tal R claims to have collected his collage material spontaneously over a period of fifteen years before assembling the works between 2005 and 2008. But this assertion seems slightly suspect, as the even distribution of faded photographs across the multicolored canvases seems to correspond to the color print quality characteristic of a certain era; the repeated owl motifs gleaned from nature magazines and aesthetically similar architectural photograph montages casts his alleged process into further doubt. If the materials selection was performed at random, then the original source of the visual material must have been somewhat limited. This strange complicity of images does, however, attest to Tal R’s artistic practice of critiquing the overwhelming tide of contemporary digital iconography, where random images can be compiled in seconds.
Nevertheless, the work in Adieu Interessant deviates from Tal R’s elsewhere folksy, homemade style: this series is marked the artist’s self-removal from the production process. After completing four collage compositions himself, Tal R outsourced the remaining six to fellow artists. The work was completed when either the materials or the artist/assemblers was exhausted. Questions are raised when unexpected visual coincidences arise—for example, the same topless woman is featured in both Brown and Green, side by side with a bespectacled man. Is it important to decipher which of these pieces Tal R himself composed? After all, such a process is marked by its potential subjectivism, with each artist layering his or her distinctive interpretation on top of Tal R’s original vision.
The final products of the series do not, however, so much depend on the individual elements of each colored canvas as the overall shape of the composition: the spiral. It is the shape of the spiral that repeatedly directs the viewer’s eye. A circle either radiating outwards or back into itself, the spiral is a metaphor for the insatiable appetite of the artist to assemble, to direct, and ultimately, to disappear. It is this central vanishing act that makes each piece in Adieu Interessant both distressing and delightful, whether viewed from close up or far away.
