David Salle: The Venice Paintings - Reprogramming the Image Review
By Margherita Artoni
Bringing together works previously presented at the Palazzo Cini in Venice, the exhibition examines how algorithmic intervention can unsettle an artist’s established language. For Salle, this experiment offers a means of testing the boundaries of authorship and the capacity of painting to absorb technological change.
The series revisits the Tapestry Paintings (1989–91), inspired by eighteenth-century Imperial Russian tapestries interpreting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian paintings. These compositions had already undergone successive translations, from oil painting to woven textile and back to canvas. Salle introduces another stage of mediation through a personalised AI model, developed from 2022 and trained primarily on his own oeuvre. The resulting compositions are fragmented and recombined, then printed onto linen and reworked with oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal. Historical references, algorithmic operations and manual interventions converge within a layered pictorial structure. The project extends questions associated with the Pictures Generation, with which Salle emerged in the 1980s. In his seminal essay Pictures (1977), Douglas Crimp examined how appropriation unsettles conventional assumptions about representation and originality.
Salle brings this inquiry into an era of algorithmic image production, where existing material can be reorganised at scale. His historical sources acquire new configurations through successive acts of mediation, revealing how meaning changes as images migrate across periods and artistic media. [...]
