David Salle Two Stacks, 2025

I've always had a desire to scramble the visual world into a vortex, to de-solidify painted reality into something that has the fluidity and velocity of a great abstract painting. 

— David Salle

Two Stacks (2025) is part of David Salle’s New Pastorals series and the result of a recent innovation in his art. For his most recent works, the artist uses artificial intelligence as a tool to create dynamic remixes of his earlier paintings. These compositions take as their starting point his Pastorals (1999–2001) – paintings inspired by a 19th-century opera backdrop that depicts a romantic couple seated in an idyllic, alpine landscape. They are manipulated into warped, illogical distortions and are printed on canvas to become the grounds onto 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. AI is useful ‘since it doesn’t know what it’s doing,’ explains the artist. ‘It can violate all the rules of depiction and have no guilty conscience about it.’ Such free, insouciant decision-making finds its precedent in the 20th century’s avant-garde, particularly the Surrealists, who devised automatic strategies and parlour games to liberate art-making from conscious thought. ‘Today,’ Salle says, ‘machine learning affords artists the means to reconfigure pictorial space with the malleability and plasticity of pure imagination.’