David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral

'Some Versions of Pastoral' is the first UK exhibition of David Salle’s latest body of work, the New Pastorals. The paintings are the result of a significant recent innovation in Salle’s art: his use of artificial intelligence as a tool to create more dynamic and conceptually rich compositions than ever before.

Over his career, David Salle has taken as his subject imagery from a wide range of sources, including magazines, advertisements, art history and cartoons. Though his subject matter is ostensibly figurative, Salle’s paintings locate the imagery in pure formal play and an all-over composition that is deeply rooted in Abstract Expressionism – what the artist describes as a ‘sensation of neither beginning nor ending […] a kind of circuitous freefall through the universe’. In these new paintings, the artist uses his own oeuvre – specifically, a group of paintings titled the Pastorals, executed in 1999 and 2000 – as raw material. Fed into a custom-made AI programme, the works are deliberately distorted to produce a variation on the pastoral scene. These freewheeling, sometimes bewildering images are then printed onto canvas to form the backdrops on 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.