David Lynch, “Boy Lights Fire,” mixed media on cardboard, 2011
DAVID LYNCH
Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 21, free
212-737-2221
www.jacktiltongallery.com
davidlynch.com
In such films as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Blue Velvet and the television series Twin Peaks, Montana-born writer-director David Lynch created off-kilter worlds that reveal the dark underbelly of contemporary society, an alternate reality that is both oddball and frightening. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his artwork explores similar territory. Lynch, who has also made such albums as BlueBob, Polish Night Music, and last year’s solo debut, Crazy Clown Time, is currently in the midst of his first gallery show in New York since 1989, an eponymously titled display that continues through Saturday at the Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side. Lynch’s offbeat combination of humor and danger is evident throughout the two-floor exhibit, which ranges from dreamlike, surreal black-and-white “Distorted Nude” photographs of body parts to haunting yet playful small watercolors to large-scale mixed-media paintings that include snippets of text and figures and brownish clumps that evoke such artists as Dieter Roth and the Brothers Quay in addition to Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Henri Matisse. In the triptych “Boy Lights Fire,” a child with impossibly long arms is playing with matches over the head of a “neighbor girl he likes a lot.” In “Bob’s Second Dream,” a tiny creature sticks out from the cardboard base with the note “his head was shaped different,” a woman’s face is split in half by the words “I don’t love you,” and nearby it is declared that “everything is fuckin broke.” Jolly old St. Nick floats off in the distance in “No Santa Claus.” And in “Boy’s Night Out,” a father is grasping a plug while his son, holding a battery, announces, “daddy’s home,” setting the stage for one very strange connection. The show also includes the forty-two-second Mystery of the Seeing Hand and Sphere, a surreal short film that encompasses Lynch’s bizarre worldview.
Writer-director Sharon Bar Ziv’s feature-film debut, Room 514, is a claustrophobic thriller about an idealistic young woman trapped between two worlds. Asia Naifeld stars as Anna, a military investigator who, as she is coming to the end of her term in the army, believes she has uncovered a serious breach of ethics involving a unit commanded by the well-connected Davidi (Udi Persi). Despite being told by her superior, Erez (Ohad Hall) ― an engaged man she is sleeping with ― to leave it alone, Anna pursues her questioning of Davidi and potential whistleblower Nimrod (Guy Kapul), a sergeant who is terrified of admitting the truth but can’t seem to just bury the lies. Bar Ziv sets most of the film inside the small Room 514, where Anna confronts Davidi and Nimrod and also has sweaty sex with Erez; only a few times does the camera venture outside to show the exhausted Anna taking the bus home, where she still lives with her mother. A tough interrogator, Anna is often interrupted by calls from her mother, which she takes even in the middle of the most heated questioning; although these scenes reveal Anna’s youth and immaturity, it is also hard to believe that her character would actually answer the phone at such moments, a serious flaw that nearly breaks down the film (which also cops out when Anna is later confronted by an army general major [Rafi Kalmar]). But it recovers once Anna is back on track and getting to the heart of both the charge of brutal violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as her relationship with Erez, which might be a whole lot more complicated than she is willing to admit to herself. Inspired by actual events, Room 514 is a compelling look inside contemporary Israeli society as the next generation faces the ongoing battle against the Palestinians while also dealing with long-standing issues of gender and sexuality.
The series also features Friðriksson’s first fiction film, the dazzling black comedy 1987 White Whales (Skytturnar). Reminiscent of the work of Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki (The Match Factory Girl, Le Havre) and Jim Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law), White Whales follows the travails of a pair of pathetic if lovable losers, Grímur (Þórarinn Óskar Þórarinsson) and Bubbi (Eggert Gudmundsson). The film begins like a nature documentary, with gorgeous shots of breeching whales — suddenly interrupted by whalers who harpoon one of the beautiful mammals and bring it in to shore. On board the ship, Grímur considers their bleak future as Bubbi spends his time looking at porn. “Well, if we’re lucky, we might get a job shoveling shit,” Grímur says. “And if that doesn’t work out, we’ll have to eat shit.” Nothing seems to faze either man as they head out on an offbeat adventure that takes them hitchhiking, coming upon an injured horse, wandering around Reykjavik, stopping in at bars, visiting Grímur’s beloved grandmother, and then, ultimately, crossing over a line and ending up in some very deep trouble. Combining Icelandic music with such English-language songs as Nick Cave’s cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” Merle Haggard’s “The Fugitive,” and Tom Waits’s “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” Friðriksson, who will attend both the April 19 and 24 screenings of White Whales, creates a hysterically funny existential atmosphere that erupts in surprising violence. Try not to let the poor subtitling get in the way of your enjoyment of this Icelandic gem.
