Picture Builder

Although frequently associated with New York’s so-called "Pictures Generation," David Salle has expressly rejected this categorization. Since the 1970s, his work has combined the techniques of appropriation with neo-expressionist tendencies. Picture Builder belongs to his series of Early Product Paintings, initiated in 1993, and synthesizes some of his most recurrent themes such as advertising, interior design, and erotica, looking back to the legacy of Pop Art. Based on a small-scale collage, it retains the sense of its original format, of cut-and-pasted fragments of images, spliced from their original contexts and reorchestrated in bold, contrasting layers. Flashes of erotic imagery intertwine with an inverted Texaco logo, a half-hidden crowd of people, a fireplace, as well as several motifs that recur throughout Salle’s practice: a crumpled handkerchief, blueberries, a hat, a draped sheet. Although his titles are often opaque, Picture Builder seems to allude to Salle himself as a constructor of collages, here investigated in painterly form.