David Salle is a notably articulate and considerate artist. His printed interviews—overlaying the 4 a long time since he captured crucial consideration in New York and Europe within the early Nineteen Eighties along with his first exhibits of work—and his personal printed writings (collected in See: Wanting, Speaking, and Fascinated by Artwork, 2016) reveal an knowledgeable tackle artwork historical past. In addition they elegantly categorical the event of his creative course of.
Salle is an everyday contributor to the pages of The New York Assessment of Books. A January 2024 article for that publication, on the retrospective Alex Katz: Gathering on the Guggenheim New York (2022-23), demonstrates the managed pacing in Salle’s prose, a direct, exact flip of phrase and a clear-eyed, direct, typically beneficiant, crucial outlook. “As you made your method up the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp,” he writes, “it was one god-damned masterpiece after one other, triumphs of perspective, of contact and color and composition. Of picture. Of favor.” And of Katz’s early New York subway drawings, from the Nineteen Forties, Salle writes: “They’re solely fast sketches, however he was already absorbing a primary precept: that specificity—of notion and likewise of the marks themselves—is every thing; the generic is the enemy of artwork.”
Salle has introduced this crucial eye and concern for specificity to bear over the previous two years when working with the engineer Grant Davis on coaching a man-made intelligence (AI) mannequin to function a device in his work. Salle and Davis have educated a customized model of Steady Diffusion, one of many main picture to textual content AI fashions, to generate intriguing machine-learning backgrounds recalling Salle’s current work.
David Salle, Blue Espresso (2025), oil; acrylic; flashe; and charcoal on archival UV print on linen © David Salle / ARS New York, 2025. Photograph: John Behrens. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul.
Salle has taken these photos generated “with the machine”, printed them on linen as backdrops after which, working in response to them, has painted overlapping, dramatised groupings of vividly pigmented on a regular basis objects: fragmented figures, female and male, in bathing fits or solar attire; disembodied arms and forearms; plaid skirts and bikinis. The completed works are tinged with Salle’s trademark ambiguity and a lurking social anomie, expressed in a realizing post-Pop Artwork play. They carry mordant references to the industrial illustrator or cinema poster artist’s tackle the American Dream, which was embedded inside Salle’s Nineteen Fifties childhood within the US Midwest. This new physique of work is collected collectively in Some Model of Pastoral, at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, the newest works in a corpus first proven on the Gladstone Gallery in New York in November 2024.
A prolonged means of trial and error
To coach their AI, Salle and Davis adopted a course of that he describes to The Artwork Newspaper as “prolonged trial and error” however one which has delivered intriguing, fruitful, outcomes. The method, he says, has “been so rewarding … [and] inviting [of] my intervention” as an artist. Within the course of Salle’s personal “capability to reply with a brush” has developed, he says, “along with the machine imagery evolving”.
That improvement, whether or not straight reciprocal or not, looks like Salle’s reward for placing within the exhausting yards coaching and studying to work with the AI. “You must think about that is one thing that does not truly know something,” he says. “So it is a quite quixotic enterprise simply to start with. Why even trouble to show it one thing? It is a machine. Nonetheless, as soon as educated, it is helpful.” Based mostly on their the work they did with Steady Diffusion, Salle and Davis knew that the AI would be capable to establish recognisable objects—a tree, a mountain—earlier than they began feeding it artwork photos.
David Salle, The Inexperienced Vest (2025), oil; acrylic; flashe; and charcoal on archival UV print on linen © David Salle / ARS New York, 2025. Photograph: John Behrens. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul.
Salle’s first problem in coaching his AI to provide fascinating digital photos was an issue with pixels. “The picture is constructed out of pixels in a machine, and the pixels haven’t any edge. The sting is solely one pixel up towards one other pixel,” he says. “Whereas in portray, not in all portray, however within the type of portray that pursuits me, the sting is without doubt one of the primary occasions… one of many signifiers of the painter’s painterly intelligence. That factor that we typically name model, a giant element of that painter’s model resides in how he or she treats edges.”
The machine, he says, “merely has no thought what an edge is. So it is a very humorous conundrum in a method”. To deal with this problem, Salle and Davis fed their AI with the work of Edward Hopper, Giorgio De Chirico and Arthur Dove. In every case Salle selected work from these artists’ work that illustrated particular portray concepts.
“The Edward Hopper was there within the combine to show the factor about worth sample, about how gentle and shadow is used to create a way of quantity.” he says. “De Chirico was there for excessive perspectival area. Arthur Dove was there as a result of his very lyrical liberal use of black as a method to weave.”
However the actual coaching occurred, he says, “once I fed the machine dozens of work I made that had been basically thick-brush sketches of figures in area and home settings of family objects, of issues in nature. However the topic was not vital; what was vital was the creation of an edge with a brush—that’s a significant mark and/or form.”
David Salle, Washing (2025), oil; acrylic; flashe; and charcoal on archival UV print on linen © David Salle / ARS New York, 2025. Photograph: John Behrens. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul.
He discovered it shocking and memorable how at this stage, within the last quarter of 2023, the feeding in of those thick-brush sketches, “the machine began to use the interpretation impact that comes into play when a painter picks up a brush. So unexpectedly we had edges that had been significant, we had edges that had been translated into brushstrokes. And the brushstrokes describe types.”
“That was actually the core of it,” Salle says. “The De Chirico, the Hopper, we did not actually need that. That was my first impulse as a result of I assumed, let’s practice the factor how I used to be educated once I was a bit of child in artwork college. You discover ways to take a look at these artists for his or her sure formal qualities. Nevertheless it wasn’t truly the factor that led to the fascinating outcomes. It was numerous pretty rapidly executed brush work that allowed the machine to come up with the concept of what an edge is and easy methods to use that.”
That was Salle’s start line. The following stage was to coach the AI on a bunch of work referred to as the Pastorals (1999-2000) which, he says, “had already been damaged up… right into a faceted sample of extremely colored type of puzzle items that match collectively in very particular color harmonies and typically three and even 4 color harmonies or palette.”
The query of Salle’s creative response to the AI-generated background, the place the mixture of two factors of view creates a 3rd, conclusive sentiment, looks like a brand new stage in a long-standing side of his artwork.
“I begin with an incapacity to see issues singularly,” he mentioned in an interview with ArtForum in 2003. “One factor routinely calls up one other factor. After which that rhyme calls up a 3rd factor to make a type of chord. I’ve a musical analogy in thoughts.” That idea calls to thoughts his transition from set up work to his early Nineteen Eighties work, characterised by paired areas and placing juxtapositions, during which he tried to seize the fluidity of movie montage, which he described within the 2003 interview as “two issues in the precise sequence make a 3rd factor or, quite, permit the thoughts to make a brand new factor”.
When working along with his AI to generate backdrop photos, no textual content prompts are used. Davis has devised a lever to instruct the AI as as to if to create a piece in a “related” or “dissimilar” mode to its gathered knowledge. So the outcomes, Salle says, “will both be very near what you have fed the machine or it will likely be wildly divergent from what you fed the machine. and also you simply transfer that lever till you discover the precise steadiness level of comparable and dissimilar”.
All through his profession sure issues have moved the Salle to motion as an artist. For now one of the vital fruitful has been his two-year engagement in constructing an AI that excites his creativeness and challenges him to wield his brush in new methods.
David Salle, Some Model of Pastoral, Thaddaeus Ropac, London, till 8 June 2025
