The AIR IS ON FIRE

Review of David Lynch's exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, published by Kunstkritikk, a Danish art magazine, in May 2007.

The most interesting part of David Lynch’s ongoing retrospective in Paris is his collages and small drawings on everything from business cards to script sketches. The large paintings, where the filmmaker strides confidently into the modernist painting tradition, do not engage in quite the same way.


David Lynch, creator of Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, devout meditator, former supporter of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps the most innovative and influential filmmaker of our time, is now for the first time presenting his work as a visual artist—paintings, drawings, and photographs—in a full retrospective.

The exhibition, held at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, follows Lynch’s development as a visual artist from the late 1950s to the present. The title—The Air is on Fire—has many points of reference. One is his own film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me from 1992; another is the effect of the vacuum bomb (also known as thermobaric explosives), which ignites the air and burns its victims both from the outside and the inside. This is no coincidence. Violence in all its forms is a central theme in Lynch’s art, and as such, the exhibition is closely connected to his films. It is dark and disturbing, though not quite as visually addictive as some of them.

As a painter, Lynch confidently enters the modernist tradition—particularly expressionist, with some touches of surrealism and Dada. Although the large canvases underscore the artist’s status as a “master,” it may be precisely this traditional format that keeps the viewer at a certain distance.

The best part of the exhibition is in the museum’s basement, where Lynch’s drawings and photographs are on display. Most interesting and cohesive are his works on paper, because here the viewer gets a glimpse into the artist’s everyday life as “another”—in this case, a filmmaker. (That the public is drawn to the exhibition precisely because of the artist’s cinematic renown underscores this point.) While a painter works alone, confronting himself and attempting to expose his own sincerity, a filmmaker’s work is in many ways a collective endeavor. It requires a minimum of openness and an ability to adapt to other perspectives. The filmmaker’s work is also more ephemeral.

Random drawings on the first sketch of the Blue Velvet script, doodles and figures drawn in ballpoint pen on studio executives’ business cards, post-it notes and notepads with phone numbers of people he has worked with, on envelopes and anything Lynch can get his hands on—all meticulously collected in an insane attempt to hold on to the most fleeting confirmations of life: both here on Earth and in Hollywood. This attempt is a logical extension of the worldview Lynch operates with: full of fear and alienation, entirely emptied of order and strict hierarchies.

The drawings are followed by photographs, the most memorable of which are images of snowmen in suburban gardens, all in varying stages of dissolution. As the viewer proceeds, the vision becomes more unsettling: the next phase of Lynch’s mental unraveling is a series of images of disfigured female bodies, assembled from erotic photographs from the early 20th century. The works resemble both the collages that characterized Dada art and the artistic output of a mentally ill patient from a locked ward.

The exhibition ends with an installation based on a small drawing—no more than 105 cm—of an interior. Two doors give you a choice of where to go, but the choice is a deception: both lead to the same basement room at the Fondation Cartier. No matter which path you take, you end up in the same place. This may be the message that concludes David Lynch’s solipsistic vision—impossible, yet prophetic.