Since the 1980s, the artist David Salle has been developing his liberal use of both pictorial space and source material, drolly collaging images plucked from magazines and art history with a magpie’s blithe indifference. His paintings display an icily cerebral, postmodern understanding that images can exist simultaneously across multiple contexts, or none at all.

The paintings continue to prove his willingness to leave meaning open-ended, which is a kind of generosity. As the director Jean Renoir said of his own approach, one that could easily apply to Salle’s, when a movie is “perfectly intelligible, the public has nothing to add.”

Salle has never strayed far from the highway that has carried him, with varying results, for the last 45 years. Still, it’s hard to believe it took this long for Salle to appropriate himself. The nine large paintings of “New Pastorals,” his latest body of work, on view through Saturday at the Gladstone Gallery, riff on “Pastorals,” a series from the early 2000s.

That one was built around a generic landscape scene, in the tradition of Giorgione, the Italian painter of the High Renaissance, and Watteau, the French Rococo painter, among others. The earlier series short-circuits: Portals rip open to reveal still lifes of apples and lemons, backgrounds crack and leak geometric shapes, figures glitch.

Where “Pastorals” were like the static of a television transmission creating unstable images, the “New Pastorals” pile those images into a juicer and hit “liquefy.” Salle’s neatly disjointed panels are gone, replaced by an all-overness of exploded figures and whorling blotches of color.