Overview
One way to subvert a hegemonic technology is to co-opt it.
—David Salle
Following David Salle’s solo presentation at the Palazzo Cini Gallery during the 61st Venice Biennale earlier this year, this exhibition, held in an intimate space at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin, reunites the works shown together in Venice. The paintings extend the New York-based artist’s use of artificial intelligence as a tool to unravel and recalibrate the logic of painting. Focusing his AI model on his earlier Tapestry Paintings (1989–91) – a series of works based on 18th-century Imperial Russian tapestries that were themselves interpretations of 16th- and 17th-century Italian oil paintings – Salle creates new paintings that collapse time, medium and place. Though committed to the centuries-old tradition of paint on canvas, Salle has been quick to adopt new technologies into his practice. His recent partnership with AI can be seen, in part, as an act of resistance to the proposition that AI will replace human creativity.
One way to subvert a hegemonic technology is to co-opt it.
—David Salle
Following David Salle’s solo presentation at the Palazzo Cini Gallery during the 61st Venice Biennale earlier this year, this exhibition, held in an intimate space at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin, reunites the works shown together in Venice. The paintings extend the New York-based artist’s use of artificial intelligence as a tool to unravel and recalibrate the logic of painting. Focusing his AI model on his earlier Tapestry Paintings (1989–91) – a series of works based on 18th-century Imperial Russian tapestries that were themselves interpretations of 16th- and 17th-century Italian oil paintings – Salle creates new paintings that collapse time, medium and place. Though committed to the centuries-old tradition of paint on canvas, Salle has been quick to adopt new technologies into his practice. His recent partnership with AI can be seen, in part, as an act of resistance to the proposition that AI will replace human creativity.
Salle has been on the cutting edge of AI image production since 2022 when he began developing a personalised model trained primarily on the contents of his own oeuvre. His purpose was not to outsource his role as an artist or thinker, but to introduce a destabilising force to his art: as the artist puts it, ‘To get outside of myself.’ The machine does not paint, or even draw anything; it distorts and deconstructs compositional space, and then reassembles the pieces into a new, synthetic whole. Salle gives us a body of work that directly engages with the central anxiety of our time: What of the human capacity for expression will survive the rise of artificial, self-teaching intelligence?
The original Tapestry Paintings embodied a key aspect of Salle’s style: simultaneity. The 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings – depicting biblical narratives, court portraiture, still lifes and other genre scenes – had been expertly translated into wool and silk by Russian weavers. Salle retranslated these tapestry compositions back into paint on canvas, creating the lyrical image clusters which are the hallmark of his art. In this exhibition, Salle’s Tapestry Paintings undergo another, more profound transformation. Though they retain the DNA of Salle’s original paintings, as well as that of their distant art historical source material, the AI model warps them into all-over abstractions, which are then printed onto canvas.
Salle, reacting intuitively, corrects, attacks or amplifies each printed pixel with his brush, while introducing another layer of imagery atop them, painted in high-contrast, high-key colour. A very old technology – oil paint – is made to coexist with a contemporary one. While AI can rapidly scan, metabolise and average vast streams of visual material – just as Salle has done in painting over the course of his career – its neural network originally had no grasp of basic pictorial values such as contours, edges, or value pattern. ‘What I did’, the artist says, ‘was send the machine to art school’, teaching it distinctly artistic lessons, such as how brushstrokes can simultaneously define an edge and act as expressive elements in their own right.
In the masterful paintings that result, courtiers, nudes, monarchs and knights in armour compete on the pictorial plane with fragments of fashion advertisements, stacks of teacups and other still-life objects. Simulated and painted realities collide and interweave, creating a theatre of vivid figurations that resist any specific temporal or geographic identity, erasing the real from the fantastical in ways that are often surprising, bizarre or even subversive. And yet the distorted forms and headless busts do not shock. By pushing these strange scenes towards a dissolution of their figurative framework, Salle neutralises their narrative sting, transporting us to an uncharted pictorial territory where even the most recognisable elements begin to function abstractly. As Salle wrestles painting away from AI’s defaults to return it to human hands, what remains is a deliberate, masterclass exercise in the power of pure form and gesture.
Everything in painting exists in the present tense. Art-historical past-times resonate through the painting even as they are subsumed within it.
—David Salle
