David Salle’s Windows #4 is an optical trick, a painting that plays the long game with your sense of perception, memory, and meaning. This 2024 work, executed in Flashe on archival digital print, mounted with silkscreen and layered on canvas, is both image and artifact—a complex object masquerading as a simple cartoon. But this is no sketch. It’s a portal. A painting of a painting of a window. A frame inside a frame. A joke, possibly. A commentary, definitely.

Salle is no stranger to the unstable identity of images, and Windows #4 continues his legacy of blending high and low, gesture and reproduction, seduction and critique. What appears at first to be a kitschy caricature—a stylized woman frozen mid-gesture, framed like a character in a television sitcom or a vintage comic—quickly reveals itself to be a dense layering of visual history, medium, and meta-awareness.

The Surface: Pop Illusionism Meets Postmodern Wit

From across the room, Windows #4 feels almost like a punchline. The woman, with her stark profile, exaggerated features, and cartoonish styling, seems pulled from a bygone Saturday morning cartoon or a 1950s advertisement. Her pink dress, rouged cheeks, and neatly coiffed hair suggest a stylized femininity, a performance of domestic glamour frozen in time.

But look again.

The crispness of her outline is digital—almost too clean. The brush marks in the background reveal themselves to be printed. The woodgrain texture of the headboard is a simulation. You realize that what you’re looking at is not a painting of a woman in a room, but a digital print overpainted with Flashe, a high-pigment matte acrylic known for its saturation and speed. This medium lets Salle work flat, bright, and fast—like silkscreen, but with a hand in the surface.

The visual joke? The entire image is framed within the painting. There’s a faux window frame rendered around the central scene, complete with decorative motifs at the top. The viewer peers in, or out—it’s unclear. The act of looking is staged. The subject—feminine, private, posed—is complicit. Is she admiring herself in a mirror? Praying? Clapping?

Or is she simply a rendered object of our gaze, like so many women in art history?

The Feminine Frame: Style, Performance, Irony

Salle’s work has always danced on the edge of eroticism and irony, of using the female form as both subject and sign. In Windows #4, the woman isn’t naked, nor is she overtly sexualized. But she’s staged in the domestic, a site historically coded as feminine. Her profile is upright, her expression unreadable, her body mid-motion. She’s cartoon-like, which distances her from realism—but she’s also emotionally vacant, which complicates the satire.

We’re not just seeing a character—we’re seeing an image of femininity, flattened and composed like an emoji before emojis. Her hair, makeup, dress—all signal a specific idea of “woman” as shaped by pop culture. Salle doesn’t offer a critique of this directly; rather, he offers the image as-is, trusting the viewer to feel the uncanniness.

This is Salle’s enduring trick: he lets style become substance. And here, the style is postmodern pastiche. It echoes Lichtenstein’s benday dots, Hockney’s windows, and even Cindy Sherman’s film stills, but it does so with neither reverence nor rebellion. It simply renders—and lets the image implicate us.

Digital Meets Manual: The Material Game

What makes Windows #4 so compelling isn’t just its visual composition—it’s the hybrid nature of its making. The work starts with a digital print, then is hand-worked with Flashe, and finally mounted on a museum box—a structure that gives the piece both objecthood and presence. Silkscreen is layered on top, possibly used to add texture or amplify the illusion of frame and depth.

This technical layering echoes Salle’s signature process from the ‘80s and ‘90s, where he famously collaged disparate images into one fractured whole. But Windows #4 is more unified. The illusion is smoother. Technology, here, is not used to rupture meaning, but to solidify it. Salle’s use of Flashe mimics screen-based color fields; his lines mimic vector paths. The hand and machine are indistinguishable at first glance.

This collapse of digital and manual echoes contemporary culture. We filter real life through apps, touch up our faces in Instagram, flatten our experiences into stories. Salle is not critiquing this with outrage—he’s presenting it as an aesthetic given. His woman is both flat and full, real and unreal. She is us.

Windows Within Windows

Let’s talk about the title: Windows #4. It suggests a series, or a system. And indeed, Salle has returned in recent years to framing devices—literal windows, panels, comic strips, and grids. The term “windows” here is loaded.

On one level, it evokes architectural space: we look through a window into a room, into a private scene. On another, it evokes computer windows—digital spaces stacked atop each other, each framed and framed again. The recursive logic of GUI (graphical user interface) is deeply embedded here: we don’t just see the subject; we see her as an object inside a window inside a painting.

This is metaphysical painting dressed as pop satire.

The result? A work that frames not only the woman, but us—the viewer—as part of the interface. We are clicking into a moment, zooming into a gesture, rendering reality pixel by pixel. Windows #4 becomes an allegory of the 21st-century gaze: curated, cropped, and framed within frames.

Art History in Drag: Salle’s Place in the Canon

To fully appreciate Windows #4, it helps to place it within David Salle’s broader project. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of the “Pictures Generation”—artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince—who treated images as unstable, recyclable symbols. Salle’s contribution was painterly: he mixed figurative scenes, abstract marks, and art historical quotes into chaotic compositions that mirrored media overload.

But Windows #4 is quieter, more restrained. It doesn’t scream with juxtaposition—it whispers with synthesis.

It’s also deeply referential. You can trace echoes of:

• Matisse, in the domestic interior and flat planes.
• Picasso, in the stylized profile and Cubist fracture of space.
• Lichtenstein, in the comic-like rendering.
• Hopper, in the voyeuristic framing and emotional isolation.
• Warhol, in the blurring of printing and painting.

But Salle doesn’t quote these artists—he inhabits their logic and drags it forward into our time. His woman is a Warhol starlet without the fame, a Lichtenstein girl without the drama. She’s a symbol of our mediated selves: posed, flattened, broadcast.

Interpretation or Simulation?

A crucial question remains: is Windows #4 meant to be interpreted? Or simply seen?

Salle has often resisted over-reading. In interviews, he’s emphasized the image as experience rather than message. And Windows #4 operates in that vein. It does not demand political analysis or cultural critique. It simply is—and in its being, it reveals its strange contradictions.

• It’s beautiful and empty.
• It’s familiar and alien.
• It’s handmade and machine-made.
• It’s painting and print, picture and portal.

In this way, it mirrors our own experiences in the digital age. We live through windows: phone screens, Zoom calls, curated feeds. Our interactions are framed. Our selves are performed. Salle isn’t lamenting this—he’s staging it.

Flow

In Windows #4, David Salle gives us more than an image—he gives us a lens. A device for thinking about how we view, render, and replicate the world. The woman at the center is not just a subject—she is a symbol. Of artifice. Of nostalgia. Of the complex beauty of surfaces.

Her pose is frozen. Her gesture, uncertain. Her environment, staged. Yet within that stillness is movement—the kind of movement that lives between layers of meaning. Salle lets us look, but never quite know. And that is the power of this work: it holds back just enough to make us lean in.

Ultimately, Windows #4 is not just a painting. It is a mirror. But instead of showing our reflection, it shows our expectations, our habits of looking, our hunger for meaning in a world of images. It renders the surface so fully that we must confront what lies underneath: the fact that sometimes, the frame is the message.

And in that message, Salle reminds us: to look is to perform. To paint is to pretend. To render is to remember.

No comments yet.