“Salle’s paintings are often structured in musical fashion,” the art critic Deborah Solomon has written, “with repetition and variation between parts and the creation of imagistic cords.” She’s referring to David Salle, the American painter from Norman, Oklahoma, whose diptych and triptych collage paintings bring images from magazines, décor, and art history into sonorous propinquity. In the 1970s, as a young man, Salle studied at the California Institute of the Arts under the conceptual artist John Baldessari. He then moved to Neo-expressionism, letting improvisation converge with compositional underpinnings, to create, he says, “a kind of exploded image.” The Brant exhibition includes important series such as the “Smoking Women” of 1979 and the “Tapestry Paintings” from the late 80s. There are also rarely seen smaller works—windows into Salle’s more poetic side. —E.C.