David Salle Some Versions of Pastoral

I've always had a desire to scramble the visual world into a vortex, to kind of desolidify painted reality into something that has the fluidity and velocity of a great abstract painting. — David Salle

Thaddaeus Ropac London is pleased to present Some Versions of Pastoral, the first UK exhibition of David Salle’s latest body of work, the New Pastorals, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the London gallery. The paintings are the result of a significant recent innovation in Salle’s art: his use of artificial intelligence as a tool to create more dynamic and conceptually rich compositions than ever before. ‘I have long dreamed of a truly malleable, elastic pictorial space,’ Salle says.

Over his career, David Salle has taken as his subject imagery from a wide range of sources, including magazines, advertisements, art history and cartoons. Though his subject matter is ostensibly figurative, Salle’s paintings locate the imagery in pure formal play and an all-over composition that is deeply rooted in Abstract Expressionism – what the artist describes as a ‘sensation of neither beginning nor ending […] a kind of circuitous freefall through the universe’. In these new paintings, the artist uses his own oeuvre – specifically, a group of paintings titled the Pastorals, executed in 1999 and 2000 – as raw material. Fed into a custom-made AI programme, the works are deliberately distorted to produce a variation on the pastoral scene. These freewheeling, sometimes bewildering images are then printed onto canvas to form the backdrops on which Salle paints. The result is a lyrical body of work that teems with new plasticity, and seems to respond to our viral visual world. 

In each painting, a miscellany of objects and anatomies converge on a single plane, where laws of gravity, space and perspective dissipate, and visual drama holds dominion. Salle renders some motifs with a masterful degree of virtuosity, while others are left unfinished and tapering. Plaid skirts are like threadbare nets, cast wide over a sea of swarming images, and shapes fail to cohere into anything except themselves: they emerge, only to slip back into the glitching, painterly abyss from which they surfaced. 

Painting is a technology in its own right, one that, as the history of art attests, has advanced over millennia through relentless modification and reinvention. For Salle, it is incumbent on the artist to make use of the tools available in their time, whether egg tempera, oil paint or photography. AI is useful ‘since it doesn’t know what it’s doing,’ he says. ‘It can violate all the rules of depiction without a pang of conscience.’ Like the human eye, it rapidly scans, processes and distils an endless stream of visual information. With the help of software engineer Grant Davis, Salle ‘sent the machine to art school’, training his model on select works by artists including Edward Hopper, Giorgio de Chirico and Arthur Dove to impart basic principles of line, edge, composition and form. The majority of the training model was made up of Salle’s brush sketches of figures in domestic settings; these formed the core of the machine’s approach. Salle then refined this dialogue, restricting the model’s dataset to a ‘very specific diet’ of his earlier Pastorals. Avoiding the pitfalls of ‘generic’ digital imagery, the result is a highly concentrated visual vocabulary, which is enriched and intensified by further layers of overpainting. In concert with the reverberations of his past pictorial invention, Salle stages what curator Nancy Spector describes as a ‘duet for one’. 

I can still hear John Baldessari’s voice in my ear from 1971 talking about the portable video camera, which was then brand new. People were arguing, “Can this be art?” And John said, “It’s just another pencil in your paint box. Either you make something interesting with it or you don’t.” — David Salle

The exhibition takes its title from the English critic and poet William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, first published in 1935. The pastoral, in literary and artistic terms, refers to a modern-day sensibility for rural life and an idealisation of rustic virtues: ‘any work about the people but not by or for them’. In the pastoral landscape tradition, artists edited their surroundings in the name of beauty. Emphasising the good and most pleasant parts of a scene and compressing them on one picture plane, their paintings were not necessarily faithful representations, but enhanced, artificial realities. Salle’s original Pastorals were based on a 19th-century opera scrim. Depicting a couple seated in bucolic, alpine environs, it contained, and allowed Salle to riff on, all the classical elements of a pastoral drama: the double plot, the courtship, the heightened contrast between natural and preternatural worlds and the passages of romantic verse clipped with wit and prose interludes. Now, 25 years later, the Pastorals are transformed into backdrops of their own; the theatres in which Salle performs his painterly improvisation.

For Salle, the algorithm is a tool with which he can steer through sequences of objects, forms, styles and genres without self-identification or overattachment to meaning. Its free, insouciant decision-making finds its precedent in the 20th century’s avant-garde, particularly the Surrealists, whose automatic strategies and parlour games were attempts to liberate creativity from conscious thought as well as prescribed aesthetic, moral and political hierarchies. Psychoanalysis, as well as Comte de Lautréamont’s description of beauty as the ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’ underpinned their exploration of dreams, free association and the illogical confluence of images. ‘Today,’ Salle says, ‘machine learning affords artists the means to reconfigure pictorial space with the malleability and plasticity of pure imagination.’ In his new works, the seam between these two realities is indistinguishable, coming together in reciprocity to deliver an immediate, total impact.