David Salle at Gagosian - New York - Brief Article

Each entry in David Salle's turgid art-about-art series of methodically interrelated pastoral excursions is sufficiently compelling to draw the viewer from one to the next and back again, through a minefield of process, iconography and art-historical allusion. Whether a studious charting of these elements provokes exhilaration or stupefaction, whether it's stimulating or exhausting, whether diligent examination confirms the artist's woozy merit or negates it--such readings are largely a matter of taste, not of the artist's ability. This show makes it evident that the serious nature of Salle's address remains intact.

Dating mostly from 2000, these 11 exercises on the theme of the fete champetre were selected from a larger body of work with similar concerns. Painted with oil and acrylic on linen and canvas, and on the generous side of easel scale, they are elaborations on a scene of idyllic rural intimacy taken from the familiar, decorative repeat of the toile de Jouy fabric now staking a recurrent claim to fashion. Each painting depicts a dapper country lad and a reluctant maiden dawdling on the bank of a mountain stream. Affecting a coy pose, she appears to strain at the laces of her bodice while recoiling from his display of a freshly caught fish, as though nothing good could come from offerings like this. He rests against a tree and she upon a boulder; behind them, a mountain peak and clouds recede into the distance.

From canvas to canvas, Salle reverses one aspect or another of this central image, turns it askew, shows it in silhouette, doubles it as in a mirror, engaging in a relentless flirtation with the givens of this pictorial convention. He employs the tree to imply a diptych when there is none, or reinforce one when there is. He inserts smaller stretched and, occasionally, shaped canvases, mostly still lifes, into the painting's main support; while these elements neither recede nor move forward from the picture plane, their boldness enlivens the whole. Salle also limns elevations of origami creatures, and in several paintings abstracts a lumpy angel from differing perspectives; he scumbles smooth surfaces into painterly passages while daring a Pucci palette of pink, powder blue and mauve.

In Spilled Fruit and Pastoral with Dragon Fly (both 2000), blue acrylic silkscreened bands repeat barely recognizable figures. The floating abstractions above these bands seem to derive from passages with equally defined boundaries mysteriously articulated in the mid-`80s work of Jasper Johns. Salle seems to propose his own work as a worthy subject for the sort of investigative full-court press Jill Johnston once brilliantly reserved for such things in Johns.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group