David Salle

David Salle is an American artist, photographer, stage designer, author of original collage paintings based on the aesthetics of Pop art. Like many artists of his generation, he drew inspiration for his rich visual language from famous works of art, arbitrarily adding elements of advertising and everyday culture to them. Salle’s techniques in contemporary graphic design are also original.

The name of the artist has become famous since the mid-1980s. His paintings filled with humor, theatricality and eroticism are multifaceted and contain a large number of cultural references. In paintings of David Salle, you can find references to the works of such classics as Velazquez and Bernini, allusions to the themes of Post-impressionists Cezanne and Giacometti, motives of Surrealist Magritte, as well as vivid images of American post-war art.

The almost photographic accuracy of the images in the paintings of Salle, which paradoxically creates a sense of unreality, is breathtaking. The longer you look at the master’s works, the more and more exciting details, hints and parallels you find. Creating his works, the artist acts intuitively; this makes his works close to Surrealism and Classical Expressionism.

David Salle is known not only as an artist but also as an authoritative art critic and art theorist. According to him, any painting should be created, first of all, for the people, and not for “abstruse” art critics. Therefore, his works are aimed at explaining the meaning of the works of past years in an accessible and understandable way, emphasizing their importance for contemporary art and tendency to continuity.

Key ideas:

– In terms of presenting information, paintings of David Salle resemble collages. However, the artist does not just freely combine images containing all sorts of cultural references. He also puts various techniques, textures and styles of drawing and fine art on one plane.

– Motives and stories are very different – from the Renaissance to modern photorealism. This is how Salle creates a kind of dialogue between different cultural eras. Such eclectic paintings do not have a single theme, but they encourage the viewer to stop in front of them for a long time, gradually studying what the author encrypted in his works.

– David Salle often uses photographs to create images. He takes pictures of the model in various poses, selects the most spectacular from ready-made pictures and recreates them on canvas using oil and acrylic paints. In the process of work, he places other pictures on the main image.

– Most of the artist’s works contain smaller paintings inside a large canvas, which were created in a completely different style, have different theme and colour scheme. According to Salle himself, these images appear spontaneously, during the work on the painting, sometimes even after the large canvas is almost finished. Overlaid on top of the main image, these pictures give it depth, clearly dividing the two-dimensional space of the picture into foreground and background.

– Since the 1990s, David Salle has been using the technique of distorting space. He takes famous images from cartoons and changes them, spinning in a whirlwind flow. Next to this bright revolving image, the artist places serious, realistic images, creating an effect of striking contrast, a sense of fantasy, unreality and ephemerality.

– The vortex flow of superimposed images creates several associations at the same time, and the viewer seems to be looking at a kaleidoscope in which random pictures are reflected. Though, the images in the paintings by David Salle are far from accidental. They have not always visible but strong bonds dictated by cultural identity, subconscious, archetypal images. In this case, the author denies the presence of any plot or narrative in his works.