Juxtapoz Journal – David Salle “My Frankenstein” @ Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

One of many main postmodern painters of the final fifty years, David Salle’s artwork is one among juxtaposition, and his creative “type” is the mixing of disparate, contrasting types. Because the Eighties, Salle has plucked compelling imagery from artwork historical past, print promoting and, most extensively, his personal images. He makes use of this supply materials to create novel and provocative mis-en-scènes that he revitalizes in paint. Salle’s artistic technique is to react to sure “givens”; to enter into a visible call-and-response with them. This facet of his work is akin to the best way sure painters at mid-century, notably Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, included discovered objects into their work; the American flag or bits of city detritus had been the “givens” to which Rauschenberg and Johns responded.

The work in My Frankenstein proceed Salle’s investigation into how machine studying can combine with conventional painterly strategies. For the previous few years, Salle has labored with an engineer to create a generative, proprietary AI mannequin educated on points of his personal oeuvre, feeding it a tightly edited collection of his previous works and prompting it to generate new picture configurations. The AI’s bizarre, counterintuitive reimaginings of Salle’s unique work have change into the brand new “givens” on this most up-to-date physique of Salle’s work.

The AI compositions kind pixelated backgrounds, enlarged and printed on canvas, onto which the artist imposes a brand new layer of painted imagery. Salle has chosen, altered, and repainted each at will, in a dramatic compositional repartee between himself and a machine mannequin of his personal making. In Morning, references to conventional creative genres together with nonetheless life, panorama, live-model drawing and historical past work abound on the edges and intersections of every canvas, a form of metaphysical glue holding the compositions collectively.

The exhibition’s title, My Frankenstein, displays the artist’s recognition of the battle inherent in his embrace of this new, still-evolving expertise. A potent metaphor for the unintended penalties of scientific ambitions, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein cautions in opposition to blind religion in a single’s beliefs and strategies—or in any prescriptive methodology. 

The Frankenstein-like suturing of images can also be illustrated within the portray Grasp and Margarita (2025), which, just like the exhibition’s title, takes the title of a celebrated novel—on this occasion Mikhail Bulgakov’s early-twentieth-century satire of the Soviet state.

Salle’s dynamic artistic course of yields work which have the expansive vitality of all-over abstraction, however achieved with the usage of representational imagery. His alternating collaboration and antagonism along with his personal AI mannequin resolves into compositions which are propulsively rhythmic, sensorially complicated and extremely emotive. Each visually embodies the central query of our time: Who’s forward, people or machine?