Of those made abroad, some show Brits on holiday. Though a few of the pictures were made outside of the UK, the majority are of British scenes and personalities. The same thing is true, or should be true, of the big Martin Parr photo show, Only Human, now at the National Portrait Gallery. They are part of the contemporary world but in no way a lamentation for its woes. Your spirits lift when you look at these big canvases. If one of the jobs of art is still to give pleasure, then this is fulfilled. The title of the exhibition is David Salle Musicality and Humour, and this seems pretty exact.

It’s only when you look again that you realise how confidently organised the compositions are. The compositions seem to have been created by a joyous lord of misrule. Human heads and figures appear among tumbling cascades of inanimate objects, crockery and occasionally shoes. Confidently designed and fluently painted, these big canvases have the kind of joie de vivre that has largely departed from contemporary artistic practice. Maybe Pop-Baroque is a good term for what he does. What he has to offer are large jolly figurative compositions which owe a lot to Pop Art while being less simplistic than what one might call Classic Pop. Human heads and figures appear among tumbling cascades of inanimate objects – ELS David Salle’s paintings are currently on view at Skarstedt. Even more of a (guilty) pleasure because the artist concerned is additionally neither female nor from an ethnic minority – characteristics which currently seem to be open sesames to achieving a presence in London’s grander galleries, especially official ones. The London exhibition scene is currently so enamoured with dead avant-gardists that it was a pleasure to see work by the well-established American artist David Salle (b.

The Waking Dream by Edward Lucie-Smith