David Salle — New paintings — Thaddaeus Ropac Marais Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 21 → February 25, 2017

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announces the upcoming solo exhibition of David Salle, comprising a series of paintings on canvas and paintings on paper.

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Immediately eye-catching, these new works combine a vibrant palette with a dense and dynamic composition. Salle juxtaposes shapes and heterogeneous images that link the photographic to the painterly, while creating disruptions between black and white areas and bold colour tones. As a whole, the painting gives the impression of a visual collage and marks a step forward in the development of the American painter’s practice.

Following this new impulse, David Salle explores a more direct and gestural relationship with the very matter of painting, to the point of freeing it from all forms of representation. He applies an enlarged black and white magazine image onto the canvas to directly transfer its pigments without digital processing. This ’photographic medium’, as the artist calls it, is revealed through the source image’s contrasting shadows that the artist transcribes through paint.

Although David Salle’s practice generally relates to figuration, these new paintings clearly show his long-standing interest in a principle of equivalence, or even reciprocity between images and abstraction, between the motif represented and the means by which it is accomplished. The works highlight the performative nature of painting itself, its non-reproducible and improvised quality.

The artist explores the tacit link that binds our gaze to the image. His visual vocabulary eventually leads to absurd relations and initiate a dynamic, autonomous of any convention. The process gradually gives elasticity and lightness to the pictorial space until the different layers of our collective consciousness are revealed. The recent paintings are imbued with irony and make vivid the strangeness of being alive today.