The imagination of an artist and artificial intelligence (AI)
DAVID SALLE WAS born in 1952 in Oklahoma (USA). Between 1970 and 1975, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts. A painter, he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. There is an exhibition of his strange, colourful paintings at the Thaddeus Ropac Gallery in London’s Dover Street until 8 June 2025.
The paintings on display are strange compositions in which everything seems to be in the wrong place, perspective is confused, and the laws of gravity seem to have been forgotten. Yet the objects and people in the paintings have been depicted in a straightforward way, without distortion or abstraction. What was going on in the artist’s mind?
Salle, an innovative artist interested in developing new techniques, has employed artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to help him compose these images. Let me explain. Between 1999 and 2001, Salle produced a series of paintings inspired by a nineteenth century opera backdrop. He scanned these images into a machine with AI capabilities, and then, without providing any text prompts or instructions, he got the machine to use its AI to warp the scenes on his paintings to create new images that contain and reconfigure all the elements in his original pictures. In this way, he obtained new compositions, on which he has based his new paintings – those on display at Thaddeus Ropac. Regarding Salle’s innovation, the gallery’s press release noted:
“Painting is a technology in its own right, one that, as the history of art attests, has advanced over millennia through relentless modification and reinvention. For Salle, it is incumbent on the artist to make use of the tools available in their time, whether egg tempera, oil paint or photography. AI is useful ‘since it doesn’t know what it’s doing,’ he says. ‘It can violate all the rules of depiction without a pang of conscience.’ Like the human eye, it rapidly scans, processes and distils an endless stream of visual information … Avoiding the pitfalls of ‘generic’ digital imagery, the result is a highly concentrated visual vocabulary, which is enriched and intensified by further layers of overpainting. In concert with the reverberations of his past pictorial invention, Salle stages what curator Nancy Spector describes as a ‘duet for one’.”
This exhibition show how AI can be used intelligently and imaginatively by those working in the arts. Even if one had no inkling that Salle had created the paintings with the help of AI, what can be seen of his work at Thaddeus Ropac is both attractive and intriguing.
