David Salle

"David Salle’s Tree of Life is an invitation to investigate both ignorance and knowledge, good and evil, with the necessary humour."

—Bernard Blistène

Tree of Life, This Time With Feeling is an exhibition of new paintings by the American artist David Salle, which represents the culmination of his celebrated Tree of Life series. Populated with characters from Peter Arno’s mid-century illustrations for the New Yorker magazine, Salle’s vibrant new works set up an intriguing human drama as the backdrop for a reflection on painting and the history of art.

David Salle began painting the Tree of Life series in 2019, centering his compositions around vibrantly coloured trees, whose roots reach down into expressive painterly worlds. Either side of the trunk, he placed figures borrowed from Peter Arno’s mid-century illustrations for the New Yorker magazine, setting in an intriguing human drama as a backdrop for a reflection on painting and the history of art.

Across the exhibition, brightly coloured trees bisect Salle’s compositions, simultaneously concealing and structuring the scene unfolding behind them. Acting as a spine, or an anchor, they appear to condition the interactions of the characters on either side, held in place as they are by the branching structure. In his canvases, they also serve to break traditional rules of composition, dividing the pictorial space in two, rather than conforming to the rule of thirds.

The motif of the tree reverberates throughout the history of art, from the Garden of Eden, as depicted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1528, to the 19th-century drawings of Shaker artist Hannah Cohoon. Trees have also often been used in attempts to draw a direct lineage from French painting to American Modern art, which has long been one of the foundational myths of American painting. All of these references coalesce in the new paintings by Salle, who identifies the tree with a form of collective experience, a lineage of which we are all a part.

"The tree is a wonderful image that people have been painting, I'm sure, since they first started picking up a brush. [...] It's really one of the most amazing structures, and as a pictorial device, it's this anchor."

—David Salle

Salle’s trees seem to grow out of subterranean painterly worlds that evoke the visual language of Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. These panels offer a distinct space for Salle to experiment with a more instinctive form of mark-making, which feeds the roots of the tree and animates the rest of the picture. They recall the predella panels found at the base of medieval and Renaissance altarpieces and in this way, represent the past, at once in a cultural, personal and art-historical sense.

In each predella, Salle alternately pours, splashes and dabs paint in bright colours, sometimes overlaying anatomical sketches or Matissian felt cutouts in an experimental way that contrasts with the schematic narrative constructed in the upper sections. In Gossip (2022), he collaged a towel used to remove excess paint from his brushes. The serendipitous pattern of colours this casual painterly gesture creates becomes a counterpoint to the artist’s deliberate approach in the scene above.

"The bottom panel, by definition, is a counterpoint to the larger panel. And as such, it can take any form. It can be painted in any way, it can be any colour. It can be a combination of forms, pure abstraction, linear forms, combinations of two, applicated collage forms, which gives me a lot of freedom."

—David Salle

Paintings like The Old Crowd (2022) act as an encore, bringing together the entire cast of the series. The group of characters is looked upon bemusedly by animals, just as in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous depiction of Adam and Eve. With ever-more gestural markings in the lower parts, the paintings in This Time with Feeling bear witness to the cacophony of modern life, or as museum curator Bernard Blistène writes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘something like what the world was at its beginning and what it would have unfailingly become.’

Viewers are encouraged to identify with stylised black-and-white figures of men and women acting out a silent human comedy in the upper part of the paintings. These are drawn from mid-century New Yorker covers by Peter Arno, whom Salle admires for his ‘ability to sell a gesture or a situation with very few brushstrokes.’ The cartoons came to define New York society from the first year of the magazine’s publication in 1925 until Arno’s death in 1968.

"Perhaps Peter Arno and his collaborators said everything there was to say about the boom days in New York that couldn’t be said by a jazz band."

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Men, sometimes hatted in the style of the day, and society ladies in form-enhancing dresses seem to embody the dynamic between men and women that has underlaid Western society since the myth of creation. They are mirrored in the fragmented doll-like body parts found in some of the lower sections, playing with stereotypical representations of gender. In related, art-historical terms, the scenes seem to parody the myth of creativity as stemming from an encounter between a male artist and his female muse.

Salle’s fractured compositions eschew any linear interpretation. The everyman and woman, represented throughout the series as types, invite viewers to project their own experience onto the scene and form their own understanding of the characters' dramatic interactions. In the same way, the multiplicity of visual references across the various components of the painting generates what the artist calls the ‘malleability of meaning’ that is at the heart of his oeuvre. The paintings are engaging without being descriptive.

"They're like music, in a way [...] Being able to identify the notes doesn’t say much about what it feels like to listen to the music."

—David Salle

David Salle's paintings are immediately recognisable for their juxtaposition of contrasting visual elements that he appropriates from popular culture, spanning cartoon imagery, advertising, graffiti and the history of art. By combining seemingly unrelated images in diverse representational styles that seem to float past one another in virtual space, he plays with viewers' aesthetic expectations and sense of perspective. Using cinematic techniques such as montage and superimposition, he creates a world of simultaneity and equilibrium that establishes dynamic and even absurd relationships. The artist reflects on the constant input of images and ideas from the media-dominated world, which become part of the collective consciousness and, in turn, influence our own sense of self.

For Salle, painting – like language or poetry – emphasises the counterbalancing of contrasting elements: 'compression, juxtaposition, simultaneity, resistance to closure, dissonance [...] It makes free use of surprising and abrupt transitions and juxtapositions. It seeks to distil entire blocks of emotion and complex experiences into the telling detail, the closely observed fragment that stands in for the whole.' Containing allusions to Pop art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as cartoons from the 1950s and 1960s, his works combine various iconographies and formal qualities. Their kaleidoscopic effects seem to reflect a constant stream of simultaneous thoughts, feelings and visuals, constituting a humorous and even ironic commentary on contemporary life and the status of painting itself.

Born in 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma, Salle lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970–75, where he was mentored by Conceptual artist John Baldessari. It was there that he first developed a strong interest in cinema and montage, as reflected in his earliest works. He came to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, who questioned the status of the image through appropriation and the exploration of mass media. Salle's first solo museum exhibition was at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1983, followed by his first retrospective in 1999 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, which travelled to the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. His work has since been shown at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2016, a solo exhibition was held at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga. Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies. His collection of critical essays, How to see, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016.