David Salle at Mary Boone Gallery

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Excerpt from an interview with David Salle by Emily Nathan

David Salle in his Fort Greene home, April, 2011

EN: Can you discuss the distinction you have made -- though it is perhaps an ambiguous, fluid one -- between the pictorial and the presentational?

DS: I made that distinction initially to illustrate a point about how a painting works -- I don’t mean it to sound over-determined. Most art is a combination of both the pictorial and the presentational -- nothing is purely one or the other. But it’s a question of emphasis, and how each is weighted. While there is a strong presentational aspect in my own work, it’s embodied in a pictorial tradition and orientation. What I mean by the pictorial is a level of integration and organization of all of the elements of the painting that results in a work singing a kind of song about itself -- but not in an academic, self-referential way; rather with a juicy and expansive kind of awareness.

Painting has a performative aspect to it -- someone has to paint it. And that performative aspect is also part of the pictorial. When I talk about composition, I mean it in the largest sense: the way the painting orchestrates its idea of itself. What does the painting think about itself, so to speak. What are its aspirations?

EN: I see the presentational, on the other hand, as a work’s offering of references and allusions that viewers might seek to bring together and to “decipher.”

DS: Well, the presentational is largely about reading cultural signs. I am more interested in personality, almost above everything else. I think works of art have personality just as people do, qualities that are related to the personality of the artist but which ultimately stand alone. A work of art is kind of like a pet, in that it takes on your personality but also has its own personality.

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"Bleeding Heart," 1984, David Salle