Artists

David Salle

Press release

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. — David Salle

Thaddaeus Ropac London is pleased to present Some Versions of Pastoral, the first UK exhibition of David Salle’s latest body of work, the New Pastorals, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the London gallery. The paintings are the result of a significant recent innovation in Salle’s art: his use of artificial intelligence as a tool to create more dynamic and conceptually rich compositions than ever before. ‘I have long dreamed of a truly malleable, elastic pictorial space,’ Salle says.

Over his career, David Salle has taken as his subject imagery from a wide range of sources, including magazines, advertisements, art history and cartoons. Though his subject matter is ostensibly figurative, Salle’s paintings locate the imagery in pure formal play and an all-over composition that is deeply rooted in Abstract Expressionism – what the artist describes as a ‘sensation of neither beginning nor ending […] a kind of circuitous freefall through the universe’. 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.