This Time With Feeling is an exhibition of new paintings by the American artist David Salle, which represents the culmination of his celebrated Tree of Life series. Populated with characters from Peter Arno’s mid-century illustrations for the New Yorker magazine, Salle’s vibrant new works set up an intriguing human drama as the backdrop for a reflection on painting and the history of art.
Across the large, multipartite canvases on view, brightly coloured trees seem to grow out of subterranean painterly worlds that evoke the visual language of Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. These panels offer a distinct space for Salle to experiment with a more instinctive form of mark-making, which feeds the roots of the tree and animates the rest of the picture. ‘The art part’, as Salle calls it in a recent interview, ‘seemed to unlock some energies, some cultural forces that sparked in me a whole range of responses.’ In each one, he alternately pours, splashes and dabs paint in bright colours, sometimes overlaying anatomical sketches or Matissian felt cutouts in an experimental way that contrasts with the schematic narrative constructed in the upper sections. Invoking their predecessors found at the base of medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, Salle’s predellas represent the past, at once in a cultural, personal and art-historical sense.
In contrast to earlier Tree of Life works, the trees in This Time With Feeling are mostly bare, as though mirroring the series coming to a close. As a motif, they reverberate throughout the history of art, invoking the trees of the Garden of Eden, as depicted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1528, or the 19th-century drawings of Shaker artist Hannah Cohoon. Trees have also often been used in attempts to draw a direct lineage from French painting to American Modern art. All of these references coalesce in the new paintings by Salle, who identifies the tree with a form of collective experience that pre-determines the actions and interactions of the characters on either side, as though it were ‘the voice of God’.
