PARIS.- 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. 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. 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 that 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 reacts intuitively to 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 spatial 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 to return it to human hands, what remains is a masterful 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

Born in 1952 in Oklahoma, Salle lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1975, where he was mentored by Conceptual artist John Baldessari. Often cited as an exemplar of Postmodernism, Salle came to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation. Salle’s first solo museum exhibition was held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1983, followed by a mid-career survey in 1987 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which later travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 1999, a retrospective of his painting originated at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and travelled to the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; and Guggenheim Bilbao.

Subsequent surveys of Salle’s work were held at the Museo de Arte Contempor�neo de Monterrey (2000), Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2009), Centro de Arte Contempor�neo de M�laga (2016) and The Brant Foundation, Greenwich (2021). His exhibition at the Palazzo Cini Gallery, Venice, titled Painting in the Present Tense, was on view from 6 May to 27 September 2026. The presentation was curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, who also contributed an essay to the catalogue dedicated to this series of paintings, published on the occasion of the exhibition.

While primarily a painter, Salle has also been active in the performing arts, designing sets and costumes for choreographer Karole Armitage. Their collaborations for the stage were seen at opera houses around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Citizens Opera House, Boston; Op�ra national de Paris; Deutsche Oper Berlin; and Op�ra Comique, Paris. Salle was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in the theatre in 1986. In 1995, Salle directed the feature film Search and Destroy, produced by Martin Scorsese, starring John Turturro, Christopher Walken and Griffin Dunne.

Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His highly lauded collection of critical essays, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016.

Salle is a member of the American National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.