David Salle: Suspenders (2025)
Oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal on archival UV print on linen
(72 x 108 in)
'I've always had a desire to scramble the visual world into a vortex,
to
kind of desolidify painted reality into something that has
the fluidity
and velocity of a great abstract painting.' - DS
I.
The 1980s was a great time to be a young painter (or a yuppie of any variety).
And whilst some of those who rose to fame in this decade didn't make it out alive - one thinks of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, for example - others are still going strong and producing interesting work 40 years on, even whilst they are no longer quite so young as they once were (who is?).
Jeff Koons, born in 1955, would be one obvious example of an enfant terrible now turned silver fox; and David Salle, born three years earlier in 1952, is another. And it's Salle and his new solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) - Some Versions of Pastoral (10 April - 10 June 2025) - that I wish to speak of here ...
II.
The exhibition borrows its title from a 1935 book by the English critic and poet William Empson; one that is widely recognised as an extraordinary work of literary criticism and written in his charismatically informal style.
Traditionally, the pastoral refers to works that depict an idealised version of rural life featuring shepherds, livestock, and idyllic landscapes. Artists didn't aim for a faithful representation, so much as the construction of an artificial reality designed to appeal to an urban audience rather than those who actually live in the countryside and work the land.
The intent was to trigger a longing for a more tranquil existence rooted in nature and for simpler times, free from the complexities and stresses of modern life.
But Salle is having none of that: his postmodern pastoral is less about bucolic myth and more about combining (what might appear to be random) images - some original and some appropriated from a wide range of sources including magazines, billboards, cartoons, and art history - in what he describes as a circuitous freefall that has neither beginning nor end, although these images of objects and bodies do dramatically converge on a plane of consisency [1].
The gallery's press release describes things perfectly:
"In these new paintings, the artist uses his own oeuvre - specifically, a group of paintings titled the Pastorals, executed in 1999 and 2000 - as raw material. Fed into a custom-made AI programme, the works are deliberately distorted to produce a variation on the pastoral scene. These freewheeling, sometimes bewildering images are then printed onto canvas to form the backdrops on which Salle paints. The result is a lyrical body of work that teems with new plasticity, and seems to respond to our viral visual world." [2]
Salle, I know, has his critics; some, for example, feel he leaves just a little too much unfinished in his work and that it's so fragmented that it lacks any coherent narrative or meaningful story (and thus, for these critics, any human import or purpose). One such critic (amusingly) wrote that Salle's indifference to such criticism "is the main if not the only critically interesting thing about his work" [3].
Others object to his use of AI to conceptualise and generate images reflective of his style and although Salle affirms his right as an artist to exploit any available technology, he acknowledges the concern that superintelligent machines may one day supersede human image-makers (and do so without a pang of conscience).
Ultimately, for Salle, "'machine learning affords artists the means to reconfigure pictorial
space with the malleability and plasticity of pure imagination'" [4].
In other words, AI is a tool with which he can "steer through sequences of objects, forms, styles and genres without self-identification or overattachment to meaning", in a carefree manner that "finds its precedent in the 20th century's avant-garde [...] whose automatic strategies [...] were attempts to liberate creativity from conscious thought as well as prescribed aesthetic, moral and political hierarchies" [5].
Beauty, for Salle - as for Comte de Lautréamont and, indeed, Man Ray and many of the Surrrealists - is born today from the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an
umbrella [6]:
Man Ray: Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection
d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie (1933)
Notes
[1] In art, a plane of composition refers to the arrangement and organisation of various elements within a work to create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing whole.
But by a plane of consistency, Deleuze and Guattari refer to something that opposes this and which consists only in the "relations of speed and slowness between unformed elements"; there is no finality or unification.
A plane of consistency, therefore, doesn't aim to produce aesthetic pleasure, so much as open up a zone of indeterminacy and a continuum of intensity upon which new thoughts and feelings can unfold and interact without being constrained by pre-existing ideas and emotions.
In sum: it's a kind of virtual realm of infinite possibilities.
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 507.
[2] Press release
for David Salle
Some Versions of Pastoral (10 April - 8 June 2025), Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37, Dover Street, London, W1. I presume the well-written text was by the Head of Press, Nini Sandhaus.
[3] Arthur Danto, quoted in Bad Reviews, ed. Aleksandra Mir and Tim Griffin (Retrospective Press, 2022).
Readers might like to note that Salle is himself a highly respected writer and critic; see his collection of essays entitled How to See: Looking, Talking, and
Thinking about Art (W. W. Norton, 2016).
[4] David Salle quoted in the press release for Some Versions of Pastoral ...
[5] Press release
for David Salle
Some Versions of Pastoral ...
[6] This is a famous line from the poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-69) by Comte de
Lautréamont; see Canto VI, Verse 3.
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