DAVID LYNCH. “GOODBYE” (2022). MIXED MEDIA. 24” X 32” X 2 1/4”. © DAVID LYNCH, COURTESY PACE GALLERY.
ELI KESZLER 2
Who is saying goodbye and at whom are they pointing the gun? Those are my first questions. The painting depicts three people (possibly two) or depending on your mood one—some sort of multi-angled vision of the same man. This version ap- peals to me, viewing the subject as a kind of Jungian Chimera or spiritual hydra. Three motivations, three ways of operating, three sides of the same man, the devil and a possessed angel on his flanks. Or maybe it’s one man, his shadow, and his victim saying goodbye to their earthly life? This painting illustrates one of the major Leitmotifs of Lynch’s phrased as a question: who are they or alternatively do they know who they are? This work is particularly cinematic. It looks like a still from a silver screen film noir that has been melted and rotted into a canvas. The metallic gun remains vivid and takes on dimen- sionality while the strange egg man lurks in the back. The Hol- lywood star deteriorated by time, psychosis, and vanity. Lynch’s work ranging from his masterpiece Mulholland
Drive all the way through his music manages to balance this ambiguity and lack of clarity with clear cultural tropes. He maintains this abstraction while having transparent emotion and narrative arcs that never unfold like you imagine. He cloaks all of his references within a cloud of darkness and abstract light. This painting is packed full of ambiguity, violence, and humor that melds together into something brutally dark and fundamentally American in just a few illustrative brush strokes. It’s reminiscent in some ways of the satirical Americana that Philip Guston achieved in his later works, or some underworld Archie comic strip. Compared to Guston’s political landscapes, Lynch’s Amer- icana is beautiful and transcendent and at the same time baked in horror, blood, surreality, and sexual violence—it’s a smile with a cracked tooth and rotting teeth, or like in this painting, a Hollywood murder sequence stuck in some sort of tormenting feedback loop that simply won’t stop.
2 Eli Keszler is a New York-based artist, composer, and percussionist. Keszler has released critically acclaimed solo records, his latest being ICONS + (LuckyMe) in 2021. He has composed original scores for Lofty Nathan’s Harka (2022), which won best actor at Cannes and Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of Sixty-Firs t (2021) which won GWFF Best First Feature Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, as well as contributed to Daniel Lopatin’s score for Uncut Gems (2019). Keszler presented a new multimedia collaboration Sync with visual artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on October 20th, performing amongst the Lozano-Hemmer’s exhibition, Common Measures , activating Pulse Topology with his percussive performance.
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