David Salle: Pictures of People and Paintings on Magazines

Skarstedt is pleased to present Pictures of People and Paintings on Magazines, the exhibition of recent paintings by David Salle (b. 1952). Bringing together two important bodies of work, the exhibition highlights the artist’s preoccupation with composition and the way in which patterns of light and shadow delineate the surfaces of depicted subjects. For Salle, the impetus behind the work is the dynamic relationships of colour and shape, alerting the viewer to the experience of looking per se. In Big Hat (2019), the planes of light defining the features of a woman work in dialogue with energetic, almost rhythmic lines of a cropped magazine cartoon. The artist’s pictures of individual people further accentuate the way in which light falls on skin whilst presenting images imbued with tenderness and intimacy. As Salle explains, “A painting of a head is first of all a study in interlocking shapes of different values and different tones. That pattern of lights and darks, of different tones of ochre or cream or sienna or umber, when combined in a certain way, create a likeness - we feel the presence of the sitter. The portraits are of friends, people in the neighbourhood, but the real subject is the way light falls on the planes of the face. The paintings are analytical.”

Executed in flashe paint on pages of Life magazine from the 1950s and 60s, the works in the ‘Paintings on Magazines’ series underscore the role of collage as an essential compositional tactic in Salle’s artistic production. The fluency of the artist’s line and the contemporaneity of his palette construct a calculated tension with the magazine imagery. Painting over the texts and advertisements from the previous era, the artist also alludes to the power of images to generate a specific emotional response and inflect our way of seeing over time. “The paintings on magazines are also a response to an existing image, a desire to expand on it, or contradict it, or sometimes even erase it or blow it up. The magazine pages give a pictorial/imagistic context which supports/invites my intervention. The pleasures of this group stem from the dialogue between the two pictorial languages, the painted and the printed. Some of it is serendipitous, some planned out - but the result looks fresh, the juxtapositions exist in the present tense.”

N.B. All quotations are taken from a recent interview with the artist.