Immediately eye-catching and combining a vibrant palette with dense, dynamic composition: David Salle juxtaposes shapes and heterogeneous images that link the photographic to the painterly, while creating disruptions between black and white areas and bold colour tones.

As a whole, the painting gives the impression of a visual collage and marks a step forward in the development of the American painter’s practice. Still, his statement of 2003 is and remains key to his whole carreer: “Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.”

Following this impulse, David Salle explores a direct and gestural relationship with the very matter of painting and colour, to the point of freeing it from all forms of representation.

Although David Salle’s practice generally relates to figuration, these new paintings clearly show his long-standing interest in a principle of equivalence, or even reciprocity between images and abstraction, between the motif represented and the means by which it is accomplished.

The artist explores the tacit link that binds our gaze to the image. His visual vocabulary eventually leads to absurd relations and initiate a dynamic, autonomous of any convention. The process gradually gives elasticity and lightness to the pictorial space until the different layers of our collective consciousness are revealed. The recent paintings are imbued with irony and, as the artist says, “make vivid the strangeness of being alive today”.

Current Exhibition:
DAVID SALLE
PAINTING IN THE PRESENT TENSE
PALAZZO CINI
VENICE, ITALY
https://www.palazzocini.it

David Salle is represented by:
LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY
NEW YORK
USA
https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/

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