Lot Essay
In False Queen, Salle characteristically overlaps disparate images borrowed from a variety of genres. Working through the layers we encounter a Daliesque painted mesh of limbs inspired by Gericault's Study of Feet and Hands, 1918-1919. The curved phallic wand, and the length of blue drapery are inspired by Magritte's The Ordeal of Sleep, 1926-1927. The brown double imaged square, together with the use of silkscreen, alludes to Pop Art and mass-produced media imagery. The central red semi-pornographic depiction of a woman of the last century, is given a trompe l'oeil effect which makes it appear as though it is part of a Cubist collage. A trilby hat has been stuck on to the canvas, mimicking the pictorial technique of Robert Rauschenberg. The trilby is surrounded by an explosion of brushwork, which refers to American Action painting both in form and in its preoccupation with the surface of the canvas.
By pastiching an extensive array of major formalistic styles as well as re-appropriating images from low art and kitsch, Salle places False Queen firmly within a post-modernist aesthetic. Salle uses an overall technique of assemblage that, layer by layer, transforms the separate images into signs, allowing him to deconstruct the differing styles of Western painting, as well as - self-referentially - his own work.
As well as visual ideas, Salle uses language as another form of overlapping. "False" is an adjective for "Queen", but may also be seen as describing the very falseness of the re-appropriated images. Again, "Queen" may be understood as referring to an actual monarch as well as to a homosexual or transvestite.
Of Salle's combination of signs and signifiers, and his overlapping use of visual, as well as spoken language, Robert Rosenblum said "At first glance, the typical Salle painting is a visual Tower of Babel". However, in the words of Lisa Liebman, David Salle's paintings in their "Sophistication of surface, allusions, puns, techniques, pungency of content and mixed overlapping projections and screens... sing siren songs that lure the viewer into a panoramic but amorphous sea of memory, subjectivity, projection and aesthetic deja vu".
By pastiching an extensive array of major formalistic styles as well as re-appropriating images from low art and kitsch, Salle places False Queen firmly within a post-modernist aesthetic. Salle uses an overall technique of assemblage that, layer by layer, transforms the separate images into signs, allowing him to deconstruct the differing styles of Western painting, as well as - self-referentially - his own work.
As well as visual ideas, Salle uses language as another form of overlapping. "False" is an adjective for "Queen", but may also be seen as describing the very falseness of the re-appropriated images. Again, "Queen" may be understood as referring to an actual monarch as well as to a homosexual or transvestite.
Of Salle's combination of signs and signifiers, and his overlapping use of visual, as well as spoken language, Robert Rosenblum said "At first glance, the typical Salle painting is a visual Tower of Babel". However, in the words of Lisa Liebman, David Salle's paintings in their "Sophistication of surface, allusions, puns, techniques, pungency of content and mixed overlapping projections and screens... sing siren songs that lure the viewer into a panoramic but amorphous sea of memory, subjectivity, projection and aesthetic deja vu".