David Salle: Under the Earth

An autumnal tree tilts with resignation as an unwanted pest leaves a trail of destruction – the undulating wave of its body curls toward the remaining yellow, orange and red leaves. Behind are a man and woman in a moment of confrontation, his meek disposition offset by her contentious posture. This Edenic scene is a palimpsest of visual form and thematic ingenuity, appealing to optimism despite undeniable fragility and mistrust.

 

Beneath the surface, tree roots are indistinguishable from a Picasso-esque abstraction of a nude figure in repose. Comedic cartoon faces traced with blue oil stick mingle in the soil in a dynamic flow of intertwined narratives. Though drawing its vitality from an early Cubist masterwork, the tree remains in a precarious state, highlighting the contrast between the proceedings above and below the surface. By employing a separate panel – as seen in the horizontal cut across the lower fourth of the canvas – Salle creates a further divide with this physical break, mirroring the disconnect between the man and woman above.

 

Salle’s Tree of Life paintings represent a consolidation, even a culmination of his working methods honed over the past forty years: the creation of a new and distinct type of relational painting. Under the Earth is a tightly compressed synthesis of five distinct pictorial languages: the tree itself, the grisaille figures, the Cubist nude, the humorous cartoon faces, and the varied types of paint application. What appears at first to be a painting of a simple, legible graphic nature, is in fact a sophisticated and highly controlled amalgamation – an almost alchemical compound. Salle combines fragments of 1940s New Yorker cartoons by Peter Arno with references to political propaganda from the 1950s (pestilent insect standing for xenophobic fears), together with Cubist roots, saturated color, and washy drips. The disparate iconographies and modes of painting are like the intertwined notes in a musical chord; they operate at fixed distances from one another, and when struck all at once, produce complex emotional resonances and overtones.