Debris brings together paintings and ceramics made by David Salle over the past five years. The title refers both to images present in several of the diptychs, as well as to the ceramic objects themselves. A number of the paintings make use of highly abstracted photographic silk-screens that reveal, on close looking, tightly cropped tangles of wire and wood, i.e., debris - that has washed up on a beach near the artist's home on Long Island.
The paintings in Debris, for the most part composed as diptychs or triptychs, are stamped with Salle's long-standing interest in juxtaposition and visual simultaneity. Through the merging of the figurative tradition and abstraction, Salle creates a dialogue between disparate elements. His style is driven by a deep knowledge of art history as well as a chameleon-like ability to adopt a diversity of aesthetic languages. In the past Salle has often affixed ceramic objects to the canvas, their 3-dimensional literalness a kind of contradiction of painting's illusionistic space; but in this recent body of work the smashed or collapsed vessel and platter shapes (more debris) begin for the first time to take on the agency and autonomy of independent art objects.