Le peintre n’est pas là is the final show in a series of four exhibitions in which the artist restricts his color palette to seven colors: pink, yellow, green, red, brown, black and white. Working within these confines, the artist is enabled to breach conventions through a play on expectations that propels his work forward.

For the exhibition, Tal deliberately selected a French title that instills the show with a sense of importance by associating it with Grand 19th Century French academic painting. He plays with the rules of academic painting with paint straight from the tube, schematic renderings and flat or skewed perspectives with shifts in scale. Tal further challenges formal expectations by exposing the painter’s assumed working process. The paintings featured in the show contain large “unfinished” sections of white primer and under drawing that depict the stereotypical painter’s haunts: the studio, the academy and the drinking hall. However, in each work, the painter is conspicuously absent.