Curated by Dorinne Mignon
In the paintings of David Salle (Nordman, Idaho, 1952) the self-referential experimentalism with art language, which had characterized conceptual research in the ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies, is converted into an experimentalism with the spurious, hybrid language of mass communication and with the scene regulated by advertising information and shaped by the media imagination, where personal memory is contaminated by broad collective and metropolitan narrations.
Working from a typically American viewpoint, Salle interprets the expectations of international art in the early ‘Eighties, marked by a return to figuration and by a reassessment of the subjective point of view, and effects an emotional immersion in the considerable chaos of contemporaneity. As the comprehensive and broad selection of the works in the exhibition demonstrates his painting is open, from a technical standpoint, to the coexistence of different pictorial techniques, to the random superimposition of compositional elements and to the integration of everyday three-dimensional objects. In this way he translates this horizontal passage through his own experience, which does not make value judgments between examples of “high” culture, drawn from his own memory, and references to comics, cinema and photography. In this discovery of a new inner freedom, which extols the active role of free association and the dynamics of the unconscious, Salle goes beyond the physical limits imposed by the painting, in the form of the diptych or triptych or “tapestry paintings,” to communicate the possible, exhilarating experience of his subjective emotions in everyday life.