Graphics by David Lynch and Horst Janssen in Oldenburg | EUROtoday

Sichtbare Dinge können unsichtbar sein.“ René Magritte hat seinen Umgang damit so erklärt: „Aber unser Denken umfasst beides, das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare. Und ich benutze die Malerei, um das Denken sichtbar zu machen.“ Wird indes das Denken ­ausgeschaltet, gebiert „der Schlaf der Vernunft“ – siehe Goya – „Ungeheuer“. Der Regisseur David Lynch hat in ­seinen Filmen unsere Furcht geweckt vor dem, was hinter jeder Fassade lauern könnte.

Hinter dem weißen Staketenzaun beim Sprengen der roten Rosen und der gelben Tulpen wird der Vorgartenbesitzer von einem Infarkt ins grüne Gras gestreckt; doch die Kamera interessiert sich nicht weiter für ihn, sondern taucht unter den Halmen hindurch, bis sie im Erdreich einen Haufen dunkel glänzender Käfer und wabernder Würmer entdeckt. Dazu läuft der Titelsong: „Blue Velvet“.

Die schwarz-weiße Anfangssequenz aus David Lynchs Erstling „Eraserhead“ ist abstrakter und doch ähnlich intro­spektiv. Sie läuft nun als Endlosschleife auf einem der Bildschirme im Horst-Janssen-Museum zu Oldenburg.

In der Ausstellung „My House is on Fire“ geht es indes weniger um seine Filme. David Lynch, Jahrgang 1946, hat als bildender Künstler angefangen und zwei Jahre an der Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts studiert. Den Weg zur Kunst hat ihm schon als Schüler der Maler und Pädagoge Robert Henri (1865 bis 1929) gewiesen. Mit seinem Buch „The Art Spirit“ hatte Henri auch Künstler wie Edward Hopper und Man Ray beeinflusst.

Henri’s philosophy of self-empowerment – long before Beuys, he saw in every person the ability to create art – has religious traits. Nothing of this can be seen in Lynch’s prints. Lynch shows how, as a lithographer, he also tried to make the invisible, if not visible, then at least conceivable. And as in his films, he balances on the knife edge that should separate the fantastic from the real – but in this case it is difficult to separate it so neatly.

Lynch characterizes his motifs as “uncanny”, which could possibly be taken from day, evening or nightmares. But “scary” is not only the disturbing feeling of worry and horror, the adjective may also be used for enhancing functions. And a few of the lithographs, that are being proven in a museum right here for the primary time in Germany, are actually extremely spectacular.

Most of the photographs are darkish, however the easy approach of integrating titles in handwriting provides them a cartoonish contact. The eye-catching sheet “My House is on Fire”, framed by black curtains, reveals a theatrical disaster: flames erupt from a chimera between man and bug, whose burning arms attain for one thing that, like a collapsing assist pillar, separates the image into two halves. At the highest left there’s a horrified face, on the backside proper there’s a futuristic missile hanging on a string, labeled as “Modern Device”. Whether this object is meant to be useful or simply paperwork the hearth like a drone or whether or not it’s merely there for compositional causes stays an open query.

The sheet, measuring 126 by 168 centimeters, is exceptionally massive for a lithograph. It was produced within the Paris printing home IDEM, a studio established in 1881 and housing the lithographic presses of the legendary Fernand Mourlot, who labored with artists equivalent to Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Giacometti. Lynch documented the printing course of in a brief movie. In interviews he raves about that “space of freedom and this joy of creating” and invokes “the magic of the stones”.

Since 2007 – his final night filler was launched within the cinema in the identical 12 months – David Lynch has been utilizing the surfaces of the Solnhofen plates, that are sanded significantly fine-grained for him, to attain results that, of their tender gradient between mild and darkish, are harking back to stills from his black… Remember white movies. The publishing home supplied a lot of the 36 works proven in Oldenburg and supplied contact with the artist. David Lynch himself designed the rebus for the title and the poster for this exhibition.

However, Lynch had by no means heard of the museum’s namesake in America earlier than. But in fact there are additionally analogues to Lynch’s lithographs in Horst Janssen’s extremely wealthy work. Some are astonishing, and it’s a credit score to the curator Alice Gericke that she really discovered them within the trove.

There are formal similarities, equivalent to the just about an identical light-dark distribution in Lynch’s “Potemkin Dream” from 2010 and Janssen’s “Antonius” from 1960, or motif similarities equivalent to in “Head on Stage” and “Auch from Paul Learned”, an early work by Janssen , whose title refers to his buddy Paul Wunderlich. Lynch and Janssen additionally handled evil black canine and succubi.

The free hand that each of them gave themselves when drawing and portray might be seen in virtually all of their works, and one can assume that the title – Janssen additionally favored to combine writing into his sheets – solely happened later. In one case it might have been the opposite approach round, as a result of a ballpoint pen drawing by Janssen displaying a copulating couple rising above a plain in a Chagall-like method bears the clearly comical signature: “The United Start.”

Because in fact there are critical variations. These are clearly seen within the physiognomies: subsequent to the ascetic David Lynch, Horst Janssen appears to be like like a baroque putto. The sensualist Janssen appears to be like at surfaces far more carefully than the neoplatonist Lynch, who’s primarily involved with what he suspects is beneath. And so it is no surprise that one remained true to his drawing expertise, whereas the opposite made movies out of his personal nightmares as a way to educate us worry much more successfully.

My home is on hearth. David Lynch – Horst Janssen. Horst Janssen Museum, Oldenburg; till February 16, 2025. No catalog.