The American surrealist David Lynch’s first New York solo show since 1989 reflects the artist’s distinctive confluence of almost cartoonish whimsy and both explicit and liminal violence. Though Lynch is obviously best known as a filmmaker, he began as an art student in Philadelphia, creating films as a means of making his art move. But whatever his medium (pop music included), all of Lynch’s work is as unmistakably Lynchian as Kafka’s is, well…you know. To that end, his art embodies the same collision of wide-eyed innocence and seething corruption, if not spiritual danger, that fuels his best films (cf. Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive).
Large mixed-media works (sometimes festooned with lightbulbs) are displayed alongside monochromatic watercolors—all like gorgeous comic nightmares. Images of fire are everywhere, a protean element that, in Lynch’s work, indicates sexuality, rage and the irrational (consider the phrase fire walk with me from Twin Peaks, as well as pervasive close-ups of fire in both Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart). But the highlight of the show is the comparatively cool “Distorted Nude,” an eerie series of black-and-white digital prints on archival paper (reminiscent of his short film “Lumière et Compagnie”) that could well be blurry nitrate outtakes from crime-scene coverage of, say, the eviscerated Black Dahlia. Or are they unearthed slides of 18th-century medical curiosities? The odd but brilliant juxtaposition of seemingly sharp, almost clinically specific subjects with an aesthetic and textural ambiguity is both unnerving and, finally, beautiful.—Jim Baker