David Salle Tree of Life, Yellow Tree, 2022

David Salle's celebrated Tree of Life paintings, begun in 2019, are centred around the titular tree, its vertical bisection of the canvas structuring their composition. In Tree of Life, Yellow Tree (2022), the sunshine-yellow trunk partially conceals two figures who have been reimagined from Peter Arno's mid-century illustrations for The New Yorker. Salle restages Arno's characters to allow misunderstanding and uncertainty to arise from their ambiguous interaction, asking the viewer to bring their own interpretation to the image. The subterranean realm below, which is executed in a distinct painterly language, gestures to the artist's stylistic interest in collage, which frequently prompts him to divide up the pictorial plane of his canvas. Juxtaposing intriguing human drama with his interest in painting traditions and the history of art, Salle draws together the different elements of his Tree of Life paintings to cultivate a 'malleability of meaning', which he sees as fundamental to his practice.