Neal Tait at White Tube Gallery

White Cube Gallery  is presenting  'Now is the discount of our winter tents', an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Neal Tait. For this exhibition, Tait has made a total environment, an installation with painted walls and a bench where visitors can sit and contemplate the works (a re-make of a distinctive 1980s design). The bench echoes the strange conjunctions of craft and technology that is a key concern in Tait’s paintings and the installation as a whole can be seen as a reaction to the inert nature of the ‘white cube’ or gallery space.

 

Tait is interested in the way that themes and ideas can become redundant through their overuse and in the way that old stories or ideas can be reconfigured to open up space for new meanings and associations. For this exhibition, Tait has created a body of work which although treated with a certain lightness in both mood and spirit, carries with it a resignation to its own possible failure. These paintings, like much of the artist’s work, have circuitous themes without obvious single entry or exit points and are underpinned by a strange, almost absurd logic. Narratives and sub-narratives are implied through collaged visual elements that have the seamless fluidity of a dream or the rhetoric of a fairy tale combined with the perverse playfulness of surrealism.

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