David Salle
26 Sep - 31 Oct 2007
DAVID SALLE
"New Paintings"
A suite of twelve new paintings by David Salle will be on view at Galleria Cardi from Sept 27th. The paintings build on Salle’s Vortex series, which were shown last year in New York to great acclaim. The works resonate with vitality and a poetic eroticism and are some of the most exciting works of Salle’s career. The new paintings are structured around the poetic juxtapositions that have always been the foundation of Salle’s work. The imagery is familiar, but arrestingly new. Images from his early work are re-shuffled and used in a fresh way. The work is charged with a subtle eroticism. The new paintings explore a deep and complex space in contrast to the deliberate flatness of Salle’s earlier work. They display a growing mastery of spatial illusion and a more refined hand. There is also a sensual embrace of color. Salle’s new work is as poetic and as conceptually interesting as his earlier work, but is now more dazzling as painting. Figuration, still life, pattern architecture and landscape are fused into a complex composition. He plays with and combines the vocabulary of historical and contemporary painting and high and low art forms. There are references to Baroque space and Caravaggiesque contrasts of light, with foreshortened figures that lean into and out of the canvas. The vortexes, derived from stretching and twisting portraits of women, sometimes taken from manga figures, sometimes from Salle’s earlier paintings, give the paintings a sense of motion and an added layer of spatial complexity. Juxtaposed with the more representational figures in the paintings, they contrast two levels of figurative reality, actual and virtual. It is appropriate that Salle’s new paintings are being exhibited in Milan, with its rich operatic tradition. Like the opera with its fusion of music, theatre, dance, costume and painted sets, Salle’s paintings are flat, rectangular versions of a total work of art. The arts of poetry, theatre and dance and even a feeling of music are combined into a single painterly composition. Nicolò Cardi says: "I'm very proud to represent for Italy the american artist David Salle, considered as an excellent creative personality for the entire world of contemporary art. As I sincerly admire him, it has been a really pleasure for me to organize and present in Milan his new twelve deeply comunicative works"
© Galleria Cardi
"New Paintings"
A suite of twelve new paintings by David Salle will be on view at Galleria Cardi from Sept 27th. The paintings build on Salle’s Vortex series, which were shown last year in New York to great acclaim. The works resonate with vitality and a poetic eroticism and are some of the most exciting works of Salle’s career. The new paintings are structured around the poetic juxtapositions that have always been the foundation of Salle’s work. The imagery is familiar, but arrestingly new. Images from his early work are re-shuffled and used in a fresh way. The work is charged with a subtle eroticism. The new paintings explore a deep and complex space in contrast to the deliberate flatness of Salle’s earlier work. They display a growing mastery of spatial illusion and a more refined hand. There is also a sensual embrace of color. Salle’s new work is as poetic and as conceptually interesting as his earlier work, but is now more dazzling as painting. Figuration, still life, pattern architecture and landscape are fused into a complex composition. He plays with and combines the vocabulary of historical and contemporary painting and high and low art forms. There are references to Baroque space and Caravaggiesque contrasts of light, with foreshortened figures that lean into and out of the canvas. The vortexes, derived from stretching and twisting portraits of women, sometimes taken from manga figures, sometimes from Salle’s earlier paintings, give the paintings a sense of motion and an added layer of spatial complexity. Juxtaposed with the more representational figures in the paintings, they contrast two levels of figurative reality, actual and virtual. It is appropriate that Salle’s new paintings are being exhibited in Milan, with its rich operatic tradition. Like the opera with its fusion of music, theatre, dance, costume and painted sets, Salle’s paintings are flat, rectangular versions of a total work of art. The arts of poetry, theatre and dance and even a feeling of music are combined into a single painterly composition. Nicolò Cardi says: "I'm very proud to represent for Italy the american artist David Salle, considered as an excellent creative personality for the entire world of contemporary art. As I sincerly admire him, it has been a really pleasure for me to organize and present in Milan his new twelve deeply comunicative works"
© Galleria Cardi