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| US FILMMAKER DAVID LYNCH POSING IN HIS INSTALATION ‘WITHOUT TITLE AT THE MAX ERNST MUSEUM IN BRUEHL. ALTHOUGH SIMILAR IN FEEL LYNCH’S EXHIBITION ‘CIRCLE OF DREAMS’ IN LA LOUVIERE MIRROR’S HIS UNIQUE CHARACTER AND ETCHINGS. |EPA/OLIVER BERG|
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Let me take you back to the year 1990. In high school wearing a bad school uniform. Bob Hawke was Prime Minister with the widest Aussie drawl you ever heard and a ripper political satire show on a hit radio station in the morning called ‘How Green Was My Cactus’.
Life was simple, being a teenager life revolved on my parents’ schedules and like all good Australian households the 37 inch TV, in a large wide brown wooden piece of furniture built to house it and our best friend, the VCR.
The times were sunny, the Melbourne warmth provided laughter and carefree days and then, in 1990 a darkness, albeit imaginary, came along to bring fascination and fire into the mix. That darkness was Twin Peaks, born of the machinations behind David Lynch’s imagination and Hill Street Blues creator Mark Frost, added to that the haunting music by Angelo Badallamenti, opening visuals of a town up near the Canadian border consumed by pine trees, woodchip and wood cutting factories as well as the peachiest of peach pies and dark black coffee our world was transformed.
Lynch let his darkest thoughts spill forth into a weekly show beginning with the shocking image of a blue girl (also a teenager) wrapped in plastic and floating down a river.
In case you want to revisit or haven’t watched Twin Peaks, I’ll let you discover its dark crevasses on your own with no spoilers.
This created a want for more David Lynch, soundtracks were bought, books based on the diaries of Twin Peaks characters and a leap and jump into the world of Lynch movies.
Blue Velvet, a Dennis Hopper led cult classic, Wild At Heart with a crooning Nick Cage and one of the later favourites The Straight Story which still stirs emotions.
David Lynch has never really stopped over the years; having started as a painter and then moved onto short film and film he continues creativity in various forms.
In just the last year he’s released a new CD Crazy Clown Time, started a charity organisation which allows for homeless or drug addicted youths to benefit from meditation classes in the US – giveforyouth.org and continues with his art.
This month with great surprise I was happy to relive all of the above from my youth to my latest exposure to Mr Lynch as I realised that he had an exhibition in Belgium. Art made of large, dark, wonderful hues of his mind encased in glass and printed on Japanese paper – his etchings had travelled to Belgium.
I found myself catching a train more than one hour away from Gare Centrale with one change of trains in Mons to re-capture just a slight feel of my youth and to see what David Lynch had been up to now traipsing out to the centre of Wallonie, a little former mining town filled with old Italio-Belgo migrants (majority, not solely).
Marie van Bosterhaut the commissioner of art works for the Belgian Centre De La Gravure Et De L’Image Imprimee welcomed me.
As you walk into the centre, a huge image of David Lynch in an apron over a metal plate covered with ink is the first impression you receive and underneath it you read that David Lynch have been working out of a studio in Paris called idem on and off for the last couple of years, the same atelier where Picasso, Giacometti and Matisse also created lithographs.
As we began on our tour Marie shows me the first ever works as etchings that David Lynch did – they are of cream background, have striking red objects on them and dark black lines in fluid form they almost seem to be inspired by Picasso, Marie tells me these need three separate blocks to produce and that Lynch has never mentioned this but who knows. His preferences she notes are Francis Bacon and Munch, inspirations visible and tangible. The idem studio in Montparnasse has been a great inspiration to Lynch, in videos which are placed outside the second floor entrance to the exhibition we see the entire process of making and shaping an image.
The exhibition covers two of the three floors of the gallery refurbished in 2007 and which is quite unique in its extensive coverage of Belgian etchings since the 1970s, its library and educative uses.
For the Lynch exhibit the team of five, took two weeks to set up the almost maze like meander through the white and grey walls which include two black small theatres where with a wall between them and back to back two television screens keep playing short films made by David Lynch’s art, etchings and music. They left me wondering whether all his new songs would be receiving this treatment.
Although David Lynch hasn’t been to see the exhibition, and Marie seems to negate the possibility of him coming to La Louviere before it closes on 19 May, Patrice Forest the head of idem in Paris has seen it.
“It is an original piece of curation” she tells me as she explains how the centre specifically chose the 160 pieces in their exhibit and curated the means to display them down to the lighting and frames for each print.
They are quite large prints, anyone with the disposable income interested has the chance to buy a limited 14 pieces which range in price from €1400 – €2400 , being an asbl the centre also has a bookshop and has created a couple of versions of the David Lynch catalogue for sale.
There is a certain feeling that follows you when you watch, see or hear any of David Lynch’s work, on my way home the jumble of textures, images and words etched into the metal plates he used or pieces of wood travelled with me as did a curious piece entitled ‘Eye in the Mountain’ on display on the second floor.
To see it, get yourself to La Louviere.
ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΑΚΟΜΑ
ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΑΚΟΜΑ
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