David Salle at CAC Malaga

CAC Malaga is a confusing space. It is one single storey building, I found myself walking around what I think were three separate shows, but the layout meant it was not easy to tell where one show ended and another began. It would be impossible to go and see one show without walking through another. I don't think this should be an issue, but it caused mild confusion as I was looking at the works.

David Salle paintings were in the first space and were genuinely engaging works. They seemed to be looking at both subject matter; narrative and form and also at the actual stuff of painting; playing with the canvas, cutting and filling holes and shapes in the surface, jigsawing works together.

The first painting to catch my eye was Charge! This was a colourful war painting, painted loosely and looking like a copy of something much older (there's probably a reference there that I didn't get). The whole painting is overlaid with Yves Klein -like prints of female bodies, pressed onto the image. The women look as if they are swimming, stretching and some are in the fetal position. The body prints have loose pencil lines around them, as if they were planned very meticulously and sketched out first. They made me think of an extremely physical making process, the loose painting of a large canvas and the manipulating the work and the bodies to print over it. The fact it was painted first, already invested with time, makes the printing process much more intriguing, presumably a messy difficult thing which can't go wrong. I am still questioning the imagery; a war scene (male) with impressions of nude female bodies masking the original image.

Other Salle paintings were more domestic, and more looked like copies of older works. These had parts of the canvas cut out, and (one coffin-shaped) other stretchers jigsawing into the gap. I really enjoyed looking at the works and feel like I need to see another Salle show to work them out more. They were very successful paintings for me.

The other interesting thing in the CAC was an installation by Kimsooja, Lotus: Zone of Zero. Lotus lanterns are hung high up in a grid and there is audio of melodic chants. The lanterns are a deep flesh-like purple, when you're walking underneath it feels comforting, womb like. The installation of the work misses it's mark though, the rectangular grid doesn't mirror or in any way take into account the triangular-ish shape of the room. The work feels as if it was moved from another gallery and installed in exactly the same way.