History Painting: Jason Salavon

SANTA FE, NM – TAI Modern presents History Painting, new work by American artist Jason Salavon. Salavon is a pioneering and internationally recognized artist who has created generative and data-driven artwork since the 1990s. History Painting employs a host of “custom software, imaginings, and elbow grease,” to reinterpret the history of the universe via eight-hundred idiosyncratic encyclopedic entries created by the artist.

With History Painting, Salavon debuts new processes that stretch and contract the understanding of generative AI, beyond its daily application into a technically dense and highly aesthetic medium in which he uses to paint these digital canvases. He says, “AI learns a universe of possibilities and it likes to stay in the center of that universe. We’ve created a tool that forces the AI out of that universe by modifying a model to make it do things that it’s not supposed to do.”

Launching from the art historical tradition of sixteenth and seventeenth century history painting, Salavon uses digital techniques he has been honing and innovating for the past thirty years to tell the story of the universe in four large panels—Origins, Emergence, Sapiens, and Modernity. These digitally layered art objects, shown in concert with looping animations made from the same prompts, exist on the cutting-edge of where, Salavon says, “the technical and the conceptual start to bleed into one another.”

Salavon’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. Born in Indiana, raised in Texas, and based in Chicago, Salavon earned his B.A. from the University of Texas and his M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

TAI Modern will open History Painting: Jason Salavon with an artist’s reception on Friday, November 29, from 5–7pm at 1601 Paseo de Peralta, in Santa Fe. We hope you will join us on Saturday, November 30 for a gallery walkthrough with the artist, from 2–3pm.