My name is David Salle.
We’re sitting in my studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
I’ve always been a figurative painter.
I was making paintings populated by people in interior spaces when I was a kid and in
a way I have been making the same painting ever since I was 14.
When I was younger I was hungry for a kind of dialogue that centred around intention
and meaning and interpretation and things like that.
Now I find as I’m older I’m just interested in the first level reaction: yes, no, good,
not good, finished, unfinished.
I always start with the complete frame of reference, which is to say the large canvas.
The paintings are made of, sometimes they’re made of a large panel with smaller panels
inset into them.
I’m not even sure why, but for some reason it makes a difference that there are separate
panels that are actually set into windows cut into the painting.
They’re not simply applied on top.
The inset panel sometimes function as a punctuation.
I don’t plan out the works in advance.
I have a vocabulary of images and motifs that I’m working with at any given time in the
work and I know that I want to bring those things into some kind of alignment but I don’t
know ahead of time what exactly that alignment’s going to be.
I’m pairing the word or the phrase with a figurative element, a very strongly painted
figurative element and another element which is, in this case, a silk screen made from
a photograph I took in this context and I think of it as joining abstraction and figuration
and language, those three elements.
I’m interested in seeing the body in space in a way that we don’t normally encounter it.
I’m interested in the effects of gravity and so, you see these poses of the model turning
and twisting and pulling herself up or down.
I don’t even know what these people are doing; they’re just doing some funny gestures
which I thought was kind of an interesting starting point.
It was carefully choreographed.
We had to lift these people up and set them down in precisely the right place on the canvas
and then, because they couldn’t get up because they’re covered with paint, we had to then
pick them up again and set them down on the floor.
So, it was a really kind of a hilarious parade of people coming in and out of the shower
and being painted and being printed.
I think that this, why does this painting work, or rather why do I think it works, rather
is to create a path for your eye to take through the painting.
Then, this painting it’s your eye keeps circulating around in a kind of figure eight
then back again and then into deeper space and then back to the surface of the canvas.
I think a good painting is something which has immediate impact and at the same time
is something which rewards a longer, prolonged viewing time and the longer you look at it
the more interesting it becomes, but it can also always go back to that starting point
of just great immediacy and that’s something that’s very satisfying.
And, if it’s only one or only the other I think it’s missing something.