David Salle The state of painting in the age of artificial intelligence
By Luca Zuccala
Artificial intelligence is no substitute for painting. It can suggest new compositional possibilities, produce unpredictable errors, and break conventions the artist would be unlikely to violate spontaneously. But the responsibility for the image, the construction of meaning, and the materiality of painting remain profoundly human. It is from this perspective that David Salle addresses one of the central questions of contemporary art. Among the protagonists of the Pictures Generation and a key figure in American painting since the 1980s, Salle presents Painting in the Present Tense , a series of works at the Palazzo Cini in Venice, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, born from the use of an artificial intelligence model trained on its own images. The result is an extension of the creative process, in which technology becomes a tool capable of producing new visual relationships.
In the following interview, David Salle addresses the relationship between painting and algorithms, the meaning of the present in the image, the dialogue with tradition and the future of representation, reiterating a belief that runs through all his research: each painting constructs its own time and its own logic.
The exhibition's title, Painting in the Present Tense, emphasizes the "present" as the condition of painting. How does this series of works redefine the relationship between historical temporality and the time of the image?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "image time," but allow me to quote the ever-perceptive Alex Katz on a related topic, that of time in portraiture. He once told me, "After about fifty or sixty years, a portrait simply becomes an image of someone wearing funny clothes." The exhibition's title is intended to dispel any sense of nostalgia and, at the same time, to sideline the obsession with historical reference. Whatever the era from which an image hails, when it enters a painting alongside other images, they all end up existing in the present tense of the painting. I'm interested in attenuating their referential nature to strengthen their relational nature.
