In his portraits and larger, dreamlike tableaux, narratives and sub-narratives are inferred through collaged visual elements that combine the rhetoric of a fairy tale with the perverse playfulness of Surrealism. All of Tait’s works seem to enjoy circuitous themes, without single entry or exit points and with a strange, almost absurd logic since they are usually based on found material and photographs or from the themes of a newspaper story. His paintings have been described as having “the disjointed syntax and inconclusive semantics of a particularly disquieting dream, though one graced by its own morbid beauty” (Caoimhin Mac Giolla Léith).
In his paintings and gouaches, Tait’s motifs can range from everyday objects – such as a lamp, a birdhouse, an umbrella or a piece of playground furniture – to more indecipherable, embryonic forms and his paintings hold several tensions in balance: between abstraction and figuration, sense and non-sense, logic and absurdity, beauty and grotesquery. In his portraits, nearly all of his subjects are depicted with their eyes and gaze averted, appearing like strangers both to the viewer and to themselves – ghostly transfiguration of their real personas.'
'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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