Incongruous or unstable relationships are one of the sources of humor in Salle’s work. Images and objects, as represented in his paintings, have a way of thwarting assumptions; often one image connects with another or turns out to be something else entirely, depending on the context. His paintings establish and make use of the conditions for these shifting relationships; their result is the “narrative capital” of painting. That is, the narrative is a result rather than the driving force of these paintings. Her subject is the way in which pictorial relationships can be organized around and emphasize certain principles or effects: Humor, Narrativity, Dissonance, Melancholy or Sentiment.

The main recurring element in the current series is enlarged details of black and white reproductions of drawings made in the 1940s and 50s. Both the motifs and their treatment are from a different time. For Salle, to paint them anew is to create a kind of history painting. The paintings are not about the cartoons, but about the world the cartoonist came up with – using the tropes of low comedy already known in their time. Exaggeration. Cartoonish slapstick. Of course, that’s just one element. The rest is “free jazz.

The other elements that run through this series like musical passages are mostly from a similar time, a time when illustration was paramount. Cartoons and commercial images are in many ways brief, abbreviated examples of how representation works, how an image is broken down into light and shadow, and as such they are useful for Salle to draw upon in his interplay of color and form. As with musical phrasing, Salle, who works like a composer and conductor, shapes the sequence of forms in his paintings by changing the tone, tempo, and dynamics.

“The paintings mix fast and slow tempos, their rhythms are syncopated, polyphonic. There is another musical analogy: the color harmonies are like the intervals between notes that form a chord; precisely calibrated tones. In fact, all the elements that make up the paintings, the patterns of value, as well as all the other relationships, of size and scale, of line to mass, of solid to open forms, of loose to solid rendering, the contrast between heavy and delicate lines, and especially the contrast between “reused” images and direct observation – all these elements and more express musical values.

The repetition of the cartoon, the bright T-shirts, and the images of the housewife dancing across the canvas in Autumn Rhythm are like numerous successive phrases that make up the melody of the painting. Above them, broomsticks and dustpans in bright yellow, reminiscent of housewives’ headscarves, ring out like high notes. The pieces of meat are like beats, at once solid sculptural forms and yet unfinished; they act like veils through which other forms can reassert themselves. The shapes and volumes of the meat – which Salle took from a diagram in a butcher’s manual – are also like architectures, monuments seen from the air that themselves seem to fly. In fact, many, if not most, of the elements in these paintings are in the air, in the air, and each element, mark and gesture within the painting contributes to an overall sense of rhythm and movement.

Salle’s new edition has the rhythmic and imaginative complexity we expect, but they also have a high energy, intensity and visual clarity, an openness that feels new and very present.