Come September 2011, when the V&A opens its mammoth survey of international art and design from 1970 to 1990, we shall be swamped with treatises about the definition, significance and legacy of postmodernism. Ahead of the rush, it’s a pleasure to be able to focus on one of the movement’s defining figures, the American painter David Salle. His first solo show in London for almost a decade, and his first with Maureen Paley, is a reminder that, at its best, postmodernism is about more than the style mash-ups and art-boom megabucks upon which po-mo’s chroniclers would have us dwell.
Laying bare the mechanisms of painting has always been Salle’s business, and he does so with a precision that looks as icily thrilling as it did when he first found fame almost 30 years ago. If romantically – optimistically – we think of painting as a kind of portal, Salle’s new, multi-part pictures, two of which have velvet ropes attached to them, offer amusing meditations on thresholds, painted and actual. Sources of light – the emanating ‘spirit’ of painting – are similarly reduced to a series of menu options – whether in the luminescent monochrome panels featuring images of empty boats and Adirondak chairs, or in figurative passages governed by strong, directional shadows, or the actual, working lightbulbs that the artist has fixed to paintings such as ‘No Hard Feelings’.
Salle, of course, does more than acknowledge painting’s problems or address its shortcomings. Accentuated here by imagery that appears to defy or succumb to gravity is a sense of the artist as choreographer, improvising with motifs, textures and meanings. For the patient observer, the exhibition is filled with echoes and punning rhymes that unfold slowly over time.