Postmodernism: David Salle

David Salle - Coming and Going, 1987
acrylic and oil on photosensitized canvas

(Musical background: Dr. J. Song, performed by Brian Ales)

Davide Salle's paintings comprise what appeared to be randomly juxtaposed images, or images painted on top of each other with deliberately ham-fisted paint handling. His subject matter tended toward the popular, the gratuitous, and the pornographic, and was combined in ways that appeared deliberately incomprehensible. His work was called cynical, calculating, and cold (Wikipedia).

Is David Salle a figurative? Well, it depends what figurative means. I would say that any part of his painting is figurative while the whole is not. His art is at once post-pop-art and post-photo-realism. He starts with elements of the real universe (captured through the eye of the camera - and these elements belong to the popular culture, that's true), processes them (to get the essential details that were forgotten in the synthesis operated by the human eye), then mixes them in impossible amalgams (to give each element a new role and a new meaning). The outcome is his own universe.




(Contemporary Art)

(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)