David Salle: 'I sent AI to art school!' The postmodern master who taught a machine to paint
By Evan Moffitt
By the time you read this article, there’s a good chance it will have already been scanned by an artificially intelligent machine. If asked about the artist David Salle, large language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini may repurpose some of the words below to come up with their answer. The bigger the data set, the more convincing the response – and Salle has been written about exhaustively since he first rose to art world stardom in the 1980s. The question is whether AI can ever say anything new about the artist and his work, or if it’s for ever condemned to generate more of the same.
A similar question lingers beneath the surface of the paintings that Salle has been making since 2023, a new series of which he has just unveiled at Thaddaeus Ropac in London. His New Pastorals were made with the aid of machine-learning software, though that’s not immediately apparent from looking at them. Each monumental canvas bears broad, gestural strokes of oil paint seemingly applied by the artist’s own hand. Close study however reveals large patches of flat, digitally printed underpainting. This is the mark of the AI model which Salle has been training to generate his work – or at least something uncannily close to it.
This machinic collaboration began with a game. Salle has long been sceptical of digital painting tools, writing in 2015 that “the web’s frenetic sprawl is opposite to the type of focus required to make a painting, or, for that matter, to look at one”. Nonetheless, there is a sprawling quality to his own paintings, which layer images from such a wide range of pop and art historical references that the eye often doesn’t know where to rest. In 2021, Salle got the idea to develop a virtual game that would allow players to rearrange those painted elements using drag-and-drop tools.
Although the tech proved impractical, in the process Salle met Danika Laszuk, a software engineer at the tech startup EAT_Works, and Grant Davis, creator of the AI-powered sketchpad app Wand. Together they fed an AI image generator work by artists whose technique Salle considers foundational – Andy Warhol for colour, Edward Hopper for volume, Giorgio de Chirico for perspective, Arthur Dove for line – then asked it to produce images based on specific text prompts. “What I did was send the machine to art school,” Salle says.
