David Lynch, Distorted Nude Photogravures
Have you ever travelled on the line that separates dreams and nightmares? David Lynch invites us to follow his steps on this very path.Lynch’s photogravures may frighten us as we wander through the various corridors of desire, but there is a place for all of us in the blurred borders of restlessness and unease…
David Lynch presents his fascination with the female body and its fragile beauty with timeless elegance in his Distorted Nude Photogravures series. Twelve dark and mesmerizing prints, rated NSFW, reinterpret photographs taken a century ago through digital manipulation, transforming archaic associations of the past into a modern perspective.
Lynch distorts the female body so elegantly that this distortion is not just a physical change; it is an expression of emotions, desires and fears. In the context of the uncanny, which Lynch centers on, nudity is not only an aesthetic element, but also an unspoken desire and an image to be understood. In this context, Lynch’s world is a universe where unknowing and intuition dance, and his art is like a broken mirror of his passionate curiosity about the female body.
The idea we encounter in John Berger that a way of seeing lies in every image and that photographs are not mechanical records as one might think, takes a concrete form in Lynch’s series of photogravures; the faint bodies in the photographs, the curtains floating in the air and the details disappearing in the darkness seep into our minds like shadows, and in fact this space is the center of Lynch’s artistic vision – the space where a gaze experiences both what it sees and what it loses at the same time.
When we pay attention, Lynch always leaves something missing in his work; his nude models are nameless and his locations are ambiguous. These omissions are like an invitation to complete the story in the viewer’s mind. Stepping to the edge of the unknown is the essence of Lynch’s work – it liberates the viewer not only with what he sees, but also with what he cannot see.
With these images, Lynch reinvents perception, redefining the unknown in a way that is both disturbing and mesmerizing, confronting us with an unprecedented pleasure of unease. Dr. Matthias Harder of the Helmut Newton Foundation says about Lynch’s series, “He surrounds the female body and soul with his camera; it feels as if he will touch women only with his eye, with compassion.” With an intense description, he leaves us alone with the perception of intimacy offered by Lynch’s seemingly distant lens.