INFINITE DEEP DAVID LYNCH
26.03.21 - 25.07.21

David Lynch’s five-decade career has followed multiple different artistic paths. The enigmatic visual language of this prolific artist can be identified both within his iconic films and his visual art. Since the 1980s, he has developed an impressive photographic body of work. Visiting factory sites while in England for the making of the film The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch started to shoot photographs of the buildings. This also marks the beginning of his fascination for industrial architecture. In Lynch’s photographic work, there is a threatening atmosphere, one might say of fear. His photographs depict the labyrinthine passages, the detritus and deterioration of these man-made structures, described by Lynch as haunting “cathedrals” of a bygone industrial era. For 30 years, he photographed these monuments of industrialization, remnants of a now lost world, when factories were proud milestones of progress but today are deserted wastelands, with their decaying walls, industrial waste and detritus. His obsession with the exterior and interior of the factories, shot in New York, New Jersey, Poland, England and Germany, seems a perfect setting for stories loaded with the emotional aura so characteristic of his films. The machinery, brick structures, cornices, domes and towers, portals and high windows attract his eye. He studies these abandoned spaces to capture the shapes and textures. These details are haunting to him, dark and beautiful at the same time. There is a sense of melancholy and desolation in the functionless buildings.

The Snowmen series (published in book form in 2007) give also a sense of Lynchian atmosphere that is dark and enigmatic: these family houses photographed in winter seem vaguely, disturbingly threatened from outside. There is no sense of domestic happiness behind the closed curtains. Lynch captures his subjects when the snow is melting which gives a sad element to the images, heightened by the fact that there is no human presence, and even less any sign of children at play in these gardens. With Lynch, even a seemingly innocent subject as a snowman becomes dark and foreboding. In a similar way to the photographs of the factories with their decay, there is a mysterious tension in this work. Again, the viewer is left alone with a strange feeling. It is a theme that is eminently part of Lynch’s universe but even when it’s so dark, there are glimmers of light, beauty, and even humor in these photographs.

In a narrative way too, Lynch’s nudes have a fearful mood. The human bodies that appear in the images are consistently deformed, incomplete, reinforcing the sense of horror. There is a palpable feeling of pain. The Distorted Nudes is reminiscent of the way Surrealists frequently portrayed women’s physicality. Lynch depicts a variety of bodies and manipulates them until they shift towards the abstract as if he invites us to plunge into the depths of the unconscious mind. Lynch portrays a world that is singular, intriguing – but above all, captivating.

CURATOR Nathalie Herschdorfer