David Lynch's images are based on photomontages, from cut-out photographic portraits, reproductions of drawings, engravings of different types and very diverse references, which allow the association of persons or scenes belonging to different spatial-temporal dimensions. The recomposition made by photomontage is not related to the unitary image of painting, but to the cinema: it evokes the cinematographic assembly, which has the power to divide the image and recompose it into unreal dispositions. Like his cinema, Lynch's photomontage cuts the bodies and tries to erase the cut's features, conglomerating the disparate into an image that nevertheless remains fractured inside.
Irruptive violence and conflict are two fundamental forces for the Lynchian poetics, totally dominated by the dream. The dream as a contradiction that manifests itself in reality, a way to destroy the world that reason has accommodated. And it is through it, under the auspices of a desire without logical barriers, that the author determines that all that matters is the image. All reality is embodied in a trance of transformation and conception, but only in the world of dreams or images. Only in this level is it possible the emerging of deep reality, hidden by the instrumental or daily relations. Therefore, it may be said, that the place where Lynch's thought dwells is that where the Terror that annuls and the Awe that protects are no longer understood in contradiction.
Lynch's images uncover two things simultaneously, two conditions intrinsically linked: on the one hand, the interpenetration between the unconscious and reality and, consequently, the overlapping of the sexual in the visual. All this is undoubtedly connected with the concept of the Freudian unheimlich ("the uncanny"). That is, an interest in events in which repressed matter returns in such a way as to destabilize the unitary identity of the subject.
Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego
The exhibition opens on November 17, in MU.SA, Sintra.
Small Stories, by David Lynch, was co-organized by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Item Gallery (Paris).