‘I sent AI to art school!’ The postmodern master who taught a machine to beef up his old work

Born in Oklahoma but raised in Wichita, Kansas, Salle was the model of precocity when he burst on to the New York scene in 1980. By 1987, he was one of the most highly valued painters of his generation, and at age 34 became the youngest artist to ever have a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Such a stratospheric rise meant Salle’s market had further to fall once figurative painting was no longer in fashion, but the artist continued to labour on ever more ambitious series, including the troublesome suite of paintings at the heart of the New Pastorals. Now, figurative painting is back with a vengeance, and Salle has met the moment – or, perhaps, the moment has met him.

To produce his latest works, Salle trained the AI on the dozen sweeping Pastorals he completed between 1999 and 2000. Landscape paintings through the looking glass, they feature a couple idling by a lake, copied from a 19th-century opera scrim, rendered in harlequin colours and overlaid with inset images and designs of wildly differing styles. These vistas almost look like they were edited in Photoshop, but Salle rendered them entirely analogue. “The first thing they teach you in colour painting classes is how to establish your palette,” he recalls. “I was really showing off. I thought, ‘I can make a painting with three separate colour palettes work and you can’t stop me.’”