1000 Words: David Salle Talks about His Paintings after the Sistine Chapel

Kantor, Jordan, Artforum International

MICHELANGELO IS A TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW--and pinch-hitting for Andy Warhol probably isn't much easier--yet these were precisely the challenges presented to David Salle when Roman art collector Carlo Bilotti recently asked him to execute a commission on the theme of the Sistine Chapel (a recast version of an unrealized Bilotti project once slated for the Pop master). Salle, who splashed on to the scene twenty-five years ago with a brazen brew of postmodern pictorial eclecticism and New York School-scale, capital-P Painting, would seem a natural fit for such an epic return to art history, having spent the past three decades developing a distinctive painterly vernacular in which preexisting imagery is deployed in lyrical, allover compositions. Typically the juxtapositions of disparate images in Salle's works destabilize our deep-seated visual habits and undermine traditional narrative, but in the three paintings completed for the commission, the artist addresses a single, unifying subject, updating biblical stories to reflect our crisis-laden era. Salle's …

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Publication information: Article title: 1000 Words: David Salle Talks about His Paintings after the Sistine Chapel. Contributors: Kantor, Jordan - Author. Magazine title: Artforum International. Volume: 44. Issue: 10 Publication date: Summer 2006. Page number: 330+. © 1999 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group.

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