David Salle: Painting in the Present Tense

David Salle presents his first solo exhibition in Venice at the Galleria di Palazzo Cini extending the New York–based artist’s use of artificial intelligence as a tool to reveal and recalibrate the logic of painting. The exhibition is curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and is supported by the gallery Thaddaeus Ropac.

In this exhibition, Salle’s Tapestry Paintings undergo a further and deeper transformation. Filtered through his artificial intelligence model, the figures and scenes already translated twice from their original Italian contexts are now deformed into phantasmagorical “all-over” abstractions. Although completely transformed, they retain the DNA of Salle’s original paintings as well as that of their distant art-historical source material. The designs are then printed onto canvas, establishing the ground on which the artist intervenes in the present. Responding intuitively, Salle corrects, attacks or amplifies each printed pixel with his brush, while simultaneously introducing a further layer of imagery painted in high-contrast, high-luminosity colours. An ancient technology – oil painting – thus coexists with a contemporary one. In the final result, courtiers, nudes, monarchs and armoured knights, hallucinated by artificial intelligence, compete on the pictorial plane with fragments of fashion advertising, stacks of teacups and other still-life objects. Simulated realities and painted realities collide and intertwine, generating fluid juxtapositions that resist any fixed temporal or geographical identity