Cover ‘Workplace’ by American artist David Salle (Image: courtesy of David Salle / ARS New York, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and John Berens)
‘Workplace’ by American artist David Salle (Image: courtesy of David Salle / ARS New York, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and John Berens)
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Coinciding with the 2026 Venice Biennale, leading American postmodern artist David Salle makes his Venetian debut with hybrid physical-digital paintings, demonstrating his belief that AI is simply another tool for artists to use
Venice is a city built on the weight of its past, with major museums, historic residences-turned-galleries, and grand hotels retaining Renaissance frescoes and Old Master paintings that define its art history. Yet inside Galleria Palazzo Cini—the former residence of 20th-century politician Vittorio Cini, which now houses a rich collection of 13th- to 18th-century Italian art—American painter David Salle is staging a high-tech disruption.
For his Venetian solo debut, Painting in the Present Tense, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and supported by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, Salle pits traditional painting against artificial intelligence (AI). As one of the pioneers of the Pictures Generation—a term given to an artist group emerging in late-1970s and early-1980s New York, known for its critical analysis of media culture—Salle uses custom algorithms to scramble his own legacy right in the heart of Venice.
Above David Salle working in the studio (Photo: courtesy of Costas Picadas)
David Salle working in the studio (Photo: courtesy of Costas Picadas)
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Setting generative technology against Venice’s historic backdrop creates a striking contrast. But for Salle, history on canvas is never static. “Present tense simply means that we look at paintings with today’s eyes,” he says. “As art history, Venice is a layer cake—everything overlaps everything else. The past gives ballast to the present, and continuity is all.”
To achieve this temporal collapse, Salle trained a custom AI model on his Tapestry Paintings (1989–91)—works originally based on 18th-century Russian tapestries that reinterpreted 16th-century Italian oils. By filtering them through AI, Salle added another iteration to a centuries-old visual game of telephone. “I knew there was more to be wrung out of the Tapestries. Then the machine came along and made it fast,” says Salle.
Above Mime (2026) by David Salle (Image: courtesy of David Salle / ARS New York, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and John Berens)
Mime (2026) by David Salle (Image: courtesy of David Salle / ARS New York, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and John Berens)
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The generated compositions are printed on linen with UV ink, serving as a base upon which Salle manually applies oil, acrylic, Flashe (a creamy, soft-body vinyl paint) and charcoal. Courtly figures and armoured knights—scrambled by AI—collide on the canvas with contemporary advertising and still-life fragments.
Salle’s spatial approach began in childhood while helping his father arrange clothing store window displays. “A store window is a proscenium stage; there’s foreground and background. That thinking is in the paintings,” he says.
In the 1980s and ’90s, this idea evolved into his famous inset panels, where he would insert smaller rectangular images or painted panels into the corners or centre of a larger canvas to create “pictures within pictures”. Created long before laptops, smartphones, and web browsers became ubiquitous, Salle was already arranging paintings much like a modern computer screen—forcing his audience to navigate layered information overlapping on a single frame. Critics viewed his work as predicting the logic of digital screen layouts.
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Above ‘Yellow Shawl’ (2025-26) (Image: courtesy of David Salle / ARS New York, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and John Berens)
‘Yellow Shawl’ (2025-26) (Image: courtesy of David Salle / ARS New York, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and John Berens)
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He built his visual language by sourcing images from art history, advertising, pop culture, design, literature and film. Beyond fine art, he frequently referenced decorative and erotic elements, combining photographs of female figures taken in his studio with depictions of interior objects, superimposing literary and film titles, and incorporating 3D design objects like furniture and patterned fabrics. Spanning high art, pop culture, interior decor and studio photography, his work doesn’t tell a linear story, but challenges how we perceive images, generate meaning and experience the world.
The artist describes his compositions as functioning like a “musical chord”, where different notes are played at the same time. Rather than merging into one flat image, each element remains distinct yet creates an emotional resonance together. This is similar to how our daily thoughts and memories are rarely orderly; they are a constant mix of what we saw on TV, a classical painting, a piece of furniture in our room or a line from a book. Salle uses his canvases to map that exact mental state.
Above An installation shot of David Salle’s ‘Painting in the Present Tense’ in Venice (Image: courtesy of Celestia Studio)
An installation shot of David Salle’s ‘Painting in the Present Tense’ in Venice (Image: courtesy of Celestia Studio)
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Now working directly with AI software, his painted canvases finally meet the digital framework they long anticipated. “I have sometimes felt over the years that I was making paintings to be seen at some point in the future,” he says. “I imagine it’s what [avant-garde French painter and writer Francis] Picabia must have felt in the late 1930s and ’40s, when he was really out on a limb.”
Rather than fearing automation, Salle co-opts technology to disrupt his own established routines. Working with engineer Grant Davis, Salle trained his custom algorithm on his personal visual archive. “I taught the machine how to ‘think’ about form by using aspects of my own work,” Salle says. “I’ve never much cared about my brand [by risking criticism from AI naysayers]. Distort and recalibrate—who doesn’t want to do that?”
Yet while the algorithm excels at scrambling forms, Salle remains clear about the limits of machine processing: “The machine has no taste—it has no sensibility apart from what I have given it. The machine doesn’t actually know anything. Or rather, it doesn’t know the inside of something; it has no real awareness of what it’s doing or why.”
He believes that making art still relies on the painter to decide what to keep or overwrite. As he puts it: “The capacity to meaningfully choose, to juxtapose—those are distinctly human.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
