David Salle
In Arco, Turin
Through December 2
David Salle is active in the fields of both drawing and painting. His artistic expression finds an outlet through a fusion of styles, brought together in the same work, and subdivided into horizontal or vertical segments. The artist thus creates diptychs characteristic for their interpolation between figurative and abstract. The impetus for his work is always intellectual in origin: culture is experienced, as the artist himself states, through the rational, not the emotional.
Salle believes it is indispensable to renew constantly, to systematically overthrow that which art history has established to date. Contrast is fundamental in Salle’s work. It reveals the multifaceted nature of his artistic language, and highlights the impossibility of supplying a harmonious view of reality. Equally important is the way the artist draws on art history, but changes it, insisting on excess, repetition, the power to reinvent. Presented in this exhibition is a series of (mostly unknown) works on paper entitled “Dreams on Paper”. The title of the series alludes ironically to the notion of dreams as a sublimation of reality.
Standing before these pieces – watercolors, acrylics, charcoals – the observer is invited to leaf through the pages of a diary: the diary of an intellectual who likes to incorporate extremely unpredictable elements into his work. In some of the horizontally paired diptychs, for example, is a recurring star motif that even takes the form of a strange sort of fruit-bowl. In others, the figures are ironic allusions to several characters from 18th century literature.
The charcoal drawings are vertically paired diptychs, the upper section streaked with color spread randomly about the paper and, in the lower part, sketchy outlines of fruit-laden baskets. The show closes with three paintings, also diptychs, depicting still life and a white canvas lightly scored with interwoven marks. The exhibition is distinguished by a visual quality that succeeds in holding the visitor on dreamland’s border.
Tiziana Conti
Translation by Rosalind Furness
