A Well-Leafed Tee invokes a Garden of Eden populated by characters adapted from Peter Arno’s iconic cartoons of New York City’s decadent café society from the 1930s and 40s. Fueled by martinis and a sense of existential crisis, Arno’s protagonists were always in pursuit of or fleeing from romantic attractions, the result being endless misunderstandings and mistaken identities. In Salle’s rendition, these actors perform their roles on a painterly stage bisected by the archetypal tree of knowledge, which in biblical lore sprouted the consummate object of temptation, the apple that insured mankind’s expulsion from a mythical place of true knowledge or pure psychic integration. In other cultural traditions the Tree of Life is a generative symbol, connecting the subterranean realm to the heavens. Both connotative possibilities are activated here since the roots of the central tree reach into a lower panel suffused with gestural abstraction and floating objects culled from Salle’s paintings. This panel suggests the unformed and the unconscious — a subjective past informed by cascading images locked into distant memories.

The story begins in a nether region of swirling colors from which recognizable items partially emerge, including a ladder, suggesting ascension. Vision is drawn upward as the tree emerges from the ground, reaching toward an imagined sky against an abstracted background. Leaves grow on nascent branches while emblematic objects from Salle’s painterly repertoire — a flying sandwich, Kleenex box, set of suitcases, Maidenform bra, hotdog with mustard a deep sea diving bell, pack of cigarettes, ice cream bar, green olive with pimento, vintage car, inverted glass of milk, work boot, punching bag and mannequin — glide in and out of view like so many flashbacks. Two pairs of Arno’s characters enter stage left and right while a worm squirms out of the apple that has materialized on the tree. The couples alternately flirt and argue while that incriminating apple succumbs to gravity. One of the women takes note of the fall. The worm, now of enormous proportions in its perch on the tree, turns a bright green.

The narrative elements are then swept away; the screen is wiped clean by one of the men’s Fedora only to start again in an endless loop that is emblematic of a creation myth that also and always projects a notion of original sin. A Well-Leafed Tree, in Salle’s animated universe, projects the eternal return of the same. An apt metaphor for an artist who has claimed that the Garden of Eden is still with us. “We're still in it: the conundrums it presents and the liberation it promises remain unresolved.”

Composed by: Sam Hillmer & Michael Beharie

For Salle, painting – like language or poetry – emphasizes the counterbalancing of contrasting elements. Containing allusions to Pop art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as cartoons from the 1950s and 1960s, his works combine various iconographies and formal qualities.