ART-PRESENTATION: David Salle-Musicality and Humour
David Salle is known for his vivid works that deconstruct existing imagery. Since the ‘70s, he’s referenced and combined everything from Impressionism and Post-War American Art to advertisements and hisown photography. David Salle is much more than a painter evading the constructs of art historical periods and authorship. He’s also an accomplished costume and set designer, film director, and writer.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Skarstedt Gallery Archive
David Salle presents a new body of work at his solo exhibition “Musicality and Humour” at Skarstedt in London. Presented for the first time, these vibrant paintings showcase Salle’s continued preoccupation with composition – the process of establishing the relationships of everything in the painting to everything else – as both the engine of painting and its subject. All the elements of painting are relational, and their relations can either be fixed, or liable to shift. Salle has made the shifting, swirling, dynamic of pictorial/spatial relationships his arena. The principle recurring element in the current series, are enlarged details of black and white renderings of drawings made in the 1940s and ‘50s. The subjects as well as their treatment are dated, from another era. The other elements that run like musical passages through this series are predominantly from a similar period. Cartoons and commercial imagery are in many ways shorthand, abbreviated examples of how representation works, how an image is broken down into light and shadow, and as such are useful for Salle to draw on in his interplay of color and form. As with musical phrasing, Salle, working like both composer and conductor, shapes the sequence of forms in his paintings altering the tone, tempo and dynamics. The repetition of the cartoon, the bright t-shirts and the images of the housewife that dance across the canvas in “Autumn Rhythm” (2018) are like numerous consecutive phrases that make up the melody of the painting. Over this broomsticks and dustpans in bright yellow, which echoes the housewives’ head scarves, ring out like high notes. The cuts of meat are like beats throughout, at once solid sculptural forms and yet unfinished; they act as veils through which other forms can reassert themselves. The shapes and volumes of the meat – adapted by Salle from a diagram in a butcher’s manual – are also like architecture, monuments seen from the air, which themselves appear to be flying. In fact, many if not most, of the elements in these paintings are airborne, aloft, and every element, every mark and gesture within the painting contributes to an overall sense of rhythm and movement.
Info: Skarstedt Gallery, 8 Bennet Street, London, Duration: 5/3-26/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.skarstedt.com
