Welcoming David Lynch’s first exhibition within its New York walls, in 2022, the powerful Pace gallery did not hesitate to present him as “an artist who makes films”, thus bringing his practice of visual arts to the forefront. The filmmaker’s work and the list of shows devoted to him are, it is true, extensive enough not to relegate his paintings, his drawings, his engravings and, to a lesser extent, his sculptures, to the rank of amiable results from an Ingres violin. David Lynch studied painting in Boston and Philadelphia, from 1965, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which remembered him in 2014 by organizing his first retrospective. But, in Paris, in 1997, at the late Piltzer gallery, we were already able to get an idea of his paintings with their thick texture, black with soot and on the surface of which cords or pieces of fabric were stuck. A sticky and abundant art which did not claim to master anything but rather admitted to being overwhelmed and decomposed by an imagination and a muddy world. A painting that also feels cramped in its frame and clumps together objects that will cause dents.
Ragged mannequins and putrid sets
What these paintings could have been sinister and exhausted was, however, offset by their plastic and physical extravagance. They covered themselves fine
Belgium
