Lynch admits the huge influence of Francis Bacon on his work but there’s also the effect of American pop art by artists such as Ed Keinholz and Robert Rauschenberg. That expressionist bent meets an orthodox surrealist language that recalls Europeans like Ernst, Magritte and Dali as well as home-grown American surrealists such as Joseph Cornell and, more recently, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.
The mixing of Lynch’s work from various periods offers some weight to what is essentially a theatrical sleight of hand. That’s not to say that Lynch doesn’t believe in the power of his art, or that it doesn’t have an impact, but there’s always a sly tip of the auteur’s hat that he knows – that we know – this is all a game.
In Lynch’s work, comprises of meta narratives where the rational and the irrational meet in broad daylight and it’s scary as hell, and just as funny. They deal with the inability to distinguish between the 'real' and the artifice, the commodification of everyday life and the sense of the fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain nature of living. To these features I would add heightened social and individual reflexivity, ironic self-referentiality, the de-differentiation of classical western categories, the questioning the inability to distinguish between the 'real' and the artifice, the commodification of everyday life and the sense of the fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain nature of living.
