A new Lynchian wave is sweeping through contemporary art

 

Anyone attuned with the contemporary oil painting scene may have noticed a trend in its figurative work: artists seem increasingly fascinated with a new kind of still life, one that injects household items such as curtains, chandeliers or human hair with twilight eeriness. There is a penchant for the flash-lit, the murky, and the disturbing; depicting human life without the human face. Inanimate objects seem alive, but with an energy we are too afraid to name.

There is no artist who better captures this atmosphere than the recently departed film director David Lynch. Visually, his movies almost have the richness of a baroque oil painting, and his stories frequently come to life in a nighttime that is quietly crackling with uncanny horrors. His films feature haunting divas wearing wigs, gloved men lurking in the dark, and an ambiguous atmosphere that is both frightening and erotic. And if Lynch had a painterly equivalent, it would surely be Rae Klein.

Klein first rose to prominence as a bit of an outsider; before gaining gallery representation, she cemented her success through her popularity on social media. I remember being arrested by Klein’s paintings when I first encountered them on Pinterest and Instagram during the tail end of the COVID pandemic; despite her work’s virality, her oeuvre had a captivating quality that haunted you even as you kept scrolling. Her art first became observably “Lynchian” in style in 2022: here, we see her palette distilled into two principal colours, red and blue (also major in Lynch’s cinematic palette), as well as an emergence of recurrent motifs such as headless wigs, rich drapery, and candelabras or chandeliers.

 

Liminul recently spoke with Grace Kalyta and Danielle Vincent, two Canadian contemporary painters (from Montreal and Toronto respectively) whose work explore this Lynchian macabre. Their work appears to be a natural progeny of Klein, and uncannily so, despite the fact that Klein’s practice emerged almost in tandem with Kalyta and Vincent’s. The widespread popularity of Klein’s imagery speaks both to the visual culture of a generation of artists shaped by the internet, as well as to the enduring potency of Lynch’s cinematic influence.  Through an investigation of the motifs favoured by Klein and her artistic lineage, we find a wave of working artists commenting on the nature of artifice, desire and liminality.

There is no better place to begin than the iconic velvet curtains of David Lynch’s underworld, which find similarities in the work of both Kalyta and Vincent. One of Kalyta’s principal fascinations is fabric and fanciful objects, in-part inspired by a childhood surrounded by antique collectors. “A lot of my paintings have to do with the performance of identity and class,” explained Kalyta. “For example, satin is really attractive to me because it feels like it fluctuates between this high and low that’s happening in my work in general. It’s really about the surface as a point of entry: what is it hiding or revealing, pageantry and facade.”

The performance of luxury points to a greater theatre of life, which Lynch constantly captured through his motif of red curtains. Several of Lynch’s films include vocal performances by a mysterious diva against a red curtain backdrop, whose siren songs serve as emotionally pivotal moments in each film. In Mulholland Drive, Rebekah Del Rio delivers a Spanish version of “Crying,” breaking Betty’s reverie and forcing her to reckon the murder of her lover and co-star. And in Blue Velvet, Isabella Rossellini’s performance draws Jeffrey from his white-picket fenced life into her dark orbit. The velvet curtains of the theatre reveal something greater about the artifice of the characters watching, breaking through a mirage of make-believe.

Both Kalyta and Vincent have made the red curtains and crystal chandeliers of old-school theatres their muse. In Vincent’s work, a rich red curtain is pulled aside to reveal a blue twilight outdoors; behind the curtain there is darkness, disturbing the ornate stillness of the interior decor. Vincent chose to intentionally crop the scene to create this tension: “it’s a nice home, with curtains and a chandelier, but you don’t know who’s there or what’s happening.”

And in Kalyta’s work, the gold-crusted crystals that dangle in front of a red curtain sparkle like a faded memory or a frame from a movie. They twinkle knowingly as a tufted constellation of studs mirror them overhead. Like in Lynch’s films, the scenes from Kalyta and Vincent’s paintings seem to be on the precipice of revealing something. 

Once the curtain is drawn, the accessories to performance – gloves and wigs and sequins — take centre stage in Kalyta’s work. “I always say I’m playing dress up with my painting,” says Kalyta. “So if I add a pearl or something like that, it just feels like the painting is getting dolled up.”  Lightning Rod depicts a fuchsia wig of rococo curls, not piled atop a head but floating in a black abyss. The fakery of luscious hair finds not only evident connection to Klein’s floating heads, but to the manicured Lynchian women; for example, Wild at Heart’s Marietta Fortune, who dresses like a pampered doll but becomes increasingly neurotic after ordering the murder of her boyfriend by the mob.

In these Lynchian paintings, all takes place at night; even the blue skies and clouds in Klein’s work seem like a fake painted background, attempting to feign cheerfulness and sunlight. “At night time, that’s when something familiar, maybe uncomfortable, becomes so strange and like a completely different world,” reflects Vincent. The flash-lit night time scenes that are featured in Vincent’s work particularly feel like frames from Lost Highway, one of Lynch’s many road-centric movies. Night Must Fall (darker darker) resembles the shack that bursts into flames at the end of the film, while Low Beams and I Wish I was The Wind feel like they are on the precipice of danger; a car accident, or something even more sinister. Her use of the transparent also mirrors its use in Mulholland Drive, another of Lynch’s movies that are fascinated by the world of paved American streets and vehicles.

What make Lynch so beloved as a director is how he turns the mundane into something eerie and unsettling. His films pull back the curtain on humans’ attempts at a manicured identity or a safe home; a world both dangerous and rich lurks under the surface. Artists Grace Kalyta and Danielle Vincent achieve similar feats in their paintings: by depicting familiar objects and spaces in darkness, cropped, or peculiarly posed, they expose beauty and comfort as a mirage, as theatre.

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Milena Pappalardo is a writer and artist based in Toronto and Montreal. She completed her Hon. Bachelor in Political Science at the University of Toronto. She loves to write about the political and psychoanalytic undercurrents of fashion, art and culture.