David Salle: Musicality and Humour

An exhibition of a new body of work by David Salle (b. 1952).

Presented for the first time, these vibrant paintings showcase Salle’s continued preoccupation with composition – the process of establishing the relationships of everything in the painting to everything else – as both the engine of painting and its subject. All the elements of painting are relational, and their relations can either be fixed or liable to shift. Salle has made the shifting, swirling, dynamic of pictorial/spatial relationships his arena.

Un-equal or unstable relationships are one of the sources of humour in Salle’s work. Images and objects, as they are depicted in his paintings have a way of confounding assumptions; often one image will conjoin with another, or turn out to be something else entirely, according to the context. His paintings set out the conditions for and make use of these shifting relationships; their result is painting’s ‘narrative capital.’ That is, narrative is a result and not the driving force of these pictures. Their subject is the way pictorial relationships can be organised around, and highlight certain principles or effects: humour, narrativity, dissonance, melancholy, or sentiment.