The Painting is in Charge

Peeking behind masks at David Lynch’s exhibition Up in Flames in Prague

David Lynch, who left this Earth a year ago, would have turned 80 on January 20, 2026. His name immediately conjures images of crimson velvet, whispering woods, and the unsettling rupture of suburban tranquility. Celebrated globally as the filmmaker behind masterpieces like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks, his identity often rests solely within the cinematic frame. However, to view Lynch merely as a director or a painter, photographer, or musician in isolation — is to miss the essential, unifying force behind his entire creative output.

As Lynch puts it, “life happens through us, not because of us:”^[1] we don’t generate ideas, but we can catch them. It’s up to us what we do with them — and Lynch had a pretty clear idea about that, whatever medium he turned to. Lynch’s comprehensive body of work, recently underscored by the retrospective exhibition Up in Flames at the DOX Center of Contemporary Art in Prague — primarily through his reproduced graphics, drawings, watercolors, and short films —, demands recognition of him as an Artist (yes, with a capital A), whose singular, lifelong pursuit is the exploration of the hidden dimensions of reality, consciousness, and the self itself.           

This essay explores the psychological connotations and art history-parallels that can be found in David Lynch’s visions, this time focusing on his works of fine art, but looking at his artistic practice (including film and other media) as a whole. In order  to find where the roots of art and psychology unite, we need to go back in time a little.

Art as reaction

Themes of psychology, the fragmented self, and the subconscious are currently very popular in Prague’s exhibition landscape. Running parallel to the introspective darkness of David Lynch, the Prague City Gallery is hosting an exhibition entitled The Double, exploring the timeless fascination with mirror images, doppelgängers, and doubles, and the dual exhibition Future Past by Josef Bolf and Josef Váchal at the Kampa Museum also focuses on the mystical subconscious and the presence of occult forces.

This synchronicity is a likely response to several contemporary pressures and anxieties. The fragmentation and dematerialization of the self and identity in the digital age and the post-pandemic fear of isolation generated an increasingly popular, collective focus on mental well-being, and a shared desire for deeper self-knowledge in today’s overwhelming world. The chaotic and hectic pace of contemporary life, also filled globally with injustice and inequality has fostered deep disillusionment.

The loss of faith in conventional, institutional systems is driving a surge in popularity for alternative approaches, including non-traditional, human-centered school systems, the increasing popularity of nomadic lifestyle or various alternative holistic healing modalities. And of course, what life brings, art reflects — and as life changes, art changes.

Probably the loudest change in art history was in the beginning of the 20th century, the era of the avantgarde, which was mainly fueled by the catastrophic failures of World War I and the social upheaval brought by industrialization. People experienced a profound loss of faith in the established political, social, and cultural institutions they felt led to this chaos.

Artists’ reaction was rejecting the academic, narrative, and aesthetic norms of canonized art, the high culture of the past, which they saw as complicit in the failed old order. Cubists shattered the traditional perspective, and expressionists distorted forms and used vivid colours to convey inner, subjective emotions, reflecting the social and psychic fragmentation of reality. The most radical movements, like dada, embraced absurdity, chance, and the anti-art of the readymade, directly challenging the very definition of what art was and rejecting its commercialization. And the new vision of surrealism sought an alternative reality in the subconscious and in dreams, aiming to grasp meanings beyond objective reality and to approach the mystery of existence — and this is also a cardinal feature of Lynch’s oeuvre, so we can consider the aspirations of the surrealists to be the artist’s primary source of inspiration.

The surrealists viewed Western emphasis on logic and reason as one of the causes of the war. Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, they wished to create a psychological and social revolution based on the unconscious mind as a source of truth that could subvert the oppressive bourgeois reality. Surrealism officially inaugurated in 1924 with the manifesto by André Breton, who stated that it “is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.”^[2]

The primary tool of surrealism was therefore pure automatism. The movement’s followers felt an elementary attraction to mythical symbols, tribal art, and the drawings of children and social outcasts — think of the works of Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, or Paul Klee. Magical realism is also rooted here: we can easily see similarities between the paintings of Magritte, Dalí, and de Chirico and Lynch’s ambivalent-realistic symbolism. Lynch’s works also evoke the Symbolist movement of the second half of the 19th century, with artists such as Gustave Moreau, James Ensor and Odilon Redon, who are often cited as precursors to his artistic vision. At the same time, by his own admission, Francis Bacon was his only influence.^[3] In any case, these artists also responded to a crisis period in human history through their visions, which were nourished by their own inner worlds.

Upon entering the Up in Flames exhibition, the first work we encounter is Lynch’s very first short film from 1967, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), which he created as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: everything that characterizes him later is already present here. It features six figures whose internal organs become visible one by one; they are filled with a red liquid that causes them to vomit. The poison may be interpreted as the intrusion of reality — that of the wild world in which the individual can no longer maintain the appearance of health and productivity. Through his own version of surrealism, Lynch perhaps demonstrates the mechanical emptiness of modern existence: the individual as a dehumanized machine trapped in a loop, whose only authentic response to the unbearable pace and artificial demands dictated by the system is visceral sickness. His multimedia approach also appears in the short film: painting, drawing, sculpture, video, movement, time, music, and sound appear as a unified whole.

Lynch vs. Dubuffet

Another movement that can be considered Lynch’s artistic precursor, and which must be mentioned when exploring the connections between art and psychology, is art brut, associated with the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Art brut literally means raw, rough, unpolished art, referring to works created outside the institutional framework of art. This includes the works of psychiatric patients, marginalized people, prisoners, Indigenous peoples, and even children’s drawings — to which we know Lynch was strongly attracted.^[4] Roger Cardinal later expanded the term art brut to the even more inclusive category of “outsider art”, describing all art created outside the boundaries of recognized culture.

Art brut operates with psychologically sensitive visual art. The theoretical content behind its working method relies on ancient, pure thinking; opposition to the concept of canonized art (and consequently bypassing academic art education); maintaining connections between different branches of art; and above all social commitment and solidarity with marginalized groups like the mentally ill, prisoners, the primitive, children. Of course, it cannot be said that Lynch did not receive any formal artistic training, but the question of what is considered “normal” from a social perspective and the assessment of mental illness played a prominent role in many of his works, and also we can find many parallels between his painting and art brut on a technical level.

Dubuffet turned to art in the 1940s and committed himself to it permanently. It was then that he noticed the pure expressive power of the works of the aforementioned groups that did not practice elitistic art. In addition to collecting these works of art, he also directed his own artistic practice in this direction. One of the first major examples of this is the 1944 lithograph series Matière et Mémoire (Matter and Memory), the title of which evokes the book of the same name by French philosopher Henri Bergson. This work addresses the problems of the relationship between the human body and spirit in the light of the connections between perception and memory, and spatial movement and time.

The illustration-like plates of Dubuffet’s series, with themes suited to genre paintings, depict entirely ordinary situations. However, through the technical execution, this fundamentally average, trivial subject matter is supplemented by a complex inner content that wraps everyday scenes in a cloak of contradiction and irrationality. Like Lynch, Dubuffet did not turn away from figurativism (which distinguishes art brut from Art Informel), but he does not merely depict the visible: he evokes, he manifests… Utilizing the most elemental, deep-rooted emotions, the tension arising from the complexity of the human soul, and the power of the id, he gouges, scrapes, scratches, and rubs the stone. These destructive techniques on the stone are perfectly observable in the plate titled Sophisticated Lady — scrapes are visible in the background, scratches in the hair, while the blotchy depiction of the face and skin bears the marks of a multi-phase, powerful acid treatment.

In terms of parallels with Lynch, one of the most interesting plates is Maison forestière (Forest Villa). Although the protagonist indicated by the title should be the forest villa itself, Dubuffet suggests it with only a few outlines; much greater emphasis is placed on the trees of the forest. These thin-trunked, tall trees, stretching upward like poles, evoke a faceless mass of people, among whom the lonely, wandering human figure can never truly be alone, yet can find no refuge in the house disappearing into the darkness. At the same time, the trees also resemble hangman’s nooses, intensifying this hopeless, dark atmosphere. This schizoid undertone is further heightened by the figure wandering on the left edge of the image, who is identical in appearance to the central figure but appears as its alter ego.

Both Lynch and Dubuffet generally use black printing ink for their graphics. Lynch justifies the color choice of his black-and-white works as follows: “One of the reasons I prefer painting in black and white, or almost black and white, is that if you have some shadow or darkness in the frame, then your mind can travel in there and dream. In general, colour is a little too real. It’s too close. It doesn’t make you dream much. If everything is visible, and there is too much light, the thing is what it is, but it isn’t any more than that.”^[5] If he does print in color, he does so with a very restrained palette, using at most red or duller earth tones. Furthermore, this hopeless, transcendental atmosphere — reminiscent of the drawings of the mentally ill — is complemented in both Dubuffet’s and Lynch’s figures by the influence of the bold contouring of children’s drawings, the reminiscence of prehistoric and ancient animal and human depictions, and the stylized, sketchy forms of tribal, primitive, and naive creators, as well as the elemental expressive power of the Expressionists and the alternative reality-creation of the Surrealists.

Lynch’s paintings and graphic works are characterized by technical virtuosity, an experimental use of tools, and an exceptional decisiveness and courage alongside the elemental power of his mode of representation: the repeated violation of the paper through scratching, erasing, scribbling, smearing, and scraping. Lynch gives mundane scenes even more mundane titles, which he often incorporates into the images for emphasis, using crooked, childlike capital letters. As he puts it, he is not the author, he merely mediates: he says “the painting is in charge.”^[6] And we can take this quite literally.

Through this visual and linguistic expression of psychic content, we can also invoke the theory of Jacques Lacan, who linked Freudian psychoanalysis with structuralism. His core thesis was that the unconscious is structured like a language; he believed that our desires and traumas exist within us not as mere instincts, but as linguistic signs. His other famous thesis is the Mirror Stage theory, which concerns the discovery of the ego: the young child who first sees themselves in their mirror reflection as a unified whole, while based on experience, their internal perception is still uncoordinated and fragmented. The foundation of our identity is therefore an illusion: an external image with which we identify; the self is thus inherently alienated from itself.^[7] Lynch does not tell a well-rounded story either; instead, he conveys the feeling that our world is governed by our desires and deficiencies rather than by common sense. What is this, if not the synopsis of Twin Peaks?

The connection between various self-states, the dreamlike, ancient sources, mental illnesses, and outsider art is powerful and undeniable. Looking at Lynch’s example, it seems possible for someone to have received formal artistic training yet still be regarded by critics as an art brut artist — for instance, due to his visionary, evocative abilities, his fascination with the manifestations of the human psyche, and his tendency to draw from the collective images and symbols of the layers of consciousness. In any case, even if Lynch is not a true outsider, it is undeniable that a certain obsession and mysticism distinguishes him from the mainstream.

Vision, Dimension, Plasticity – Lynch and Transcendental Meditation

Lynch’s body of work — despite the hype following the news of his death last year — remains quite divisive. However, the popularity surrounding him and the fact that he became world-famous as a Hollywood director while fully preserving his authenticity shows that we are truly hungry for a narrative in popular culture that does not follow the accustomed order. Lynch’s works serve as excellent projection surfaces and possess a constant imperative force: they invite the viewer to participate and collaborate; they set no expectations and even provide the viewer with choices. There is no right answer, no solution — everyone sees only as much in it as they project of themselves.

One can still feel confused when trying to find the meaning behind Lynch’s greatly symbolic works — but let’s quote David R. Hawkins^[8] to be absolved from this feeling: “Confusion is our salvation. For the confused, there is still hope. Hang on to your confusion. In the end it is your best friend, your best defense against the deathliness of others’ answers, against being raped by their ideas. If you are confused, you are still free.”^[9] We are free as long as we think, as long as we have questions. In our confusion, we evolve, we make mistakes, we are wounded — but we are the ones who decide. And thus, we remain ourselves. This is Lynch’s magic: in his world, we can be anyone, and in the process, we can discover our truest, deepest selves.

Lynch values life and death equally; he sees opportunity in error and imperfection, creating visions in alternative timeframes and spatial dimensions. Following the logic of dreams, both in his films and fine art he allows the story to unfold in its own way, guided by vision, intuition, and emotion rather than dramaturgical rules. When reflecting on Lynch, we can only manufacture theories; it is futile to try to explain something that was not created to be understood in a traditional sense. Lynch speaks of “big, big pieces of time” upon which we humans drift. In his view, it is foolish to believe we can understand or manage the situation; it is a complex issue that can best be grasped through the abstraction of painting.^[10]

Lynch’s entire artistic body of work is a holistic endeavor fueled by Transcendental Meditation (TM), which he considers an indispensable tool for accessing the deepest layers of the unconscious. To use his most famous analogy: “Ideas are like fish.”^[11] If you want to catch a big fish, you have to go deep — Lynch dives using the vehicle of TM. This may explain the anti-intellectual, intuitive nature of his works. For Lynch, the task of the artist is not  generating ideas, but the bringing to the surface and the mediation of these abstract, already existing images — the symbols of the individual and collective unconscious. His goal is to shatter the “Lacanian mirror” — the flat surface of reality — and create works of art that open a gateway to deep, hidden textures and collective psychic processes. These dimensions manifest materially in Lynch’s visual art: his paintings are not classical, “flat” works — Lynch seeks atmosphere, movement, plasticity, height, and depth. His aggressively textured paintings bulge, his surfaces are layered, he scrapes pieces out of his watercolors, and the plasticity of various materials can be observed in his relief prints and collographs.

The diversity of mediums present in the Up in Flames exhibition demonstrates that the material is secondary; the overarching vision is paramount. The brush, the language, the lithographic stone, or the camera are simply interchangeable tools for capturing the internal image. Sometimes he even draws tiny, portable universes on matchboxes — so that “the fire can truly walk with us.” This technical freedom allows Lynch to concentrate fully on his central, recurring motifs: insects, houses, forests, specific animals, deformed human bodies, fire, sexuality, violence, and electricity. We can even view the installation space itself as a “Lynchian dimension”: the museum rooms, with walls playing with tones of grey, black, and orange-red, and the constant background noise of humming and rustling from the exhibited short films, which sometimes require us to enter curtained, pitch-black spaces. This is what Lynch does best, whether in film or fine art: he creates an atmosphere that transforms the work from a narrative statement into a tool for the viewer’s immersion in their own subjective dimensions.

Dreams, Fantasies, Symbols, Masks

The psychological theme in Lynch’s works on paper thus materializes in the form of raw emotional focus, through coarse, scratched materials and surfaces, and unsettling textures. He boldly evokes disgust and takes pleasure in repelling — and this attracts us hypnotically, almost like disaster tourists. The shiver experienced from a safe distance and the “forbidden” visuality provide our brains with a perverse dopamine hit: Lynch’s art transforms instinctive disgust into an aesthetic experience, where the meeting of precisely presented composition and dark content finally shapes the stomach-turning into a recognizable, identifiable beauty.

A perfect example of this is Head #1–15, part of Lynch’s 2013 photo series Small Stories, which features a row of gigantically enlarged, manipulated, truncated, distorted, and faceless heads. An indispensable aspect of Lynch’s work is the question of the layers of the self, the central element of which is his attraction to the human figure — and specifically to the head, the face, and masks.

In Hans Belting’s theory regarding the face and the mask,^[12] the artificial mask can establish a connection with the living in two ways: through extreme, exaggerated facial expressions, or through a stillness frozen in total expressionlessness. The natural face is incapable of this on its own; however, we perceive these masks (like the anti-portraits of Head #1–15) as faces in this form. This ambivalence also manifests in the mimicry of our living faces as a natural mask: facial expressions are simultaneously capable of betraying and revealing the inner self, as well as disguising and concealing it.

Through the revealing nature of masks, following Lacan, we can also mention the structure of consciousness in Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology when examining Lynch’s layers of the self. Jung deals with the universally valid meanings of symbols, and one of the most unique aspects of his psychology is that the collective unconscious also possesses symbols. We call these archetypes: genetically inherited, instinctive patterns of action that influence an individual’s self-knowledge, behavior, and social connections.

In Jung’s vocabulary, the image we project toward the community — our public self — is called the Persona. In several languages today, ‘persona’ still refers to the individual or person. However, the word originates from the Latin personare, meaning ‘to sound through’ — a property that led to its use in antiquity to designate a mask. According to analytical psychology, the persona is not identical to the conscious self (the Ego); it is merely an adaptable part of it that arises under the influence of social expectations. Its definition, therefore, essentially matches that of a social mask. The persona is the complement to the deeper Self; it is a compensatory alternative forced into roles.

The so-called compensating archetypes form opposites to the identity of the conscious ego. The more we identify with our persona, the less room for maneuver the Self has. This gives rise to the Shadow personality in the unconscious, where omitted and displaced things accumulate, only to break forth occasionally in the form of dreams, fantasies, or thoughts. The traits of our shadow personality are those that we project onto other suitable people through the defense mechanisms of projection. Its opposite is identification, during which suppressed content rises from the unconscious into the consciousness; as a result, the personality undergoes an obvious transformation, taking on the features of its shadow.

Lynch’s most direct connection to Jungian psychology is found in his visualization of the Shadow gaining total control through the collapse of the persona. Taking Twin Peaks as an example, the town initially wears a collective social personality (a mask), which the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body begins to strip away. The physical “unwrapping” of the corpse symbolically shatters the portrait of Laura as the perfect high school prom queen, forcing the community to face the evil lurking in the depths (incest, violence, murder, drugs, prostitution, etc.).

The theme of alienation is further examined in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) through the character of Dougie Jones — one expression of Dale Cooper’s multi-fragmented personality planes. Dougie’s expressionless, catatonic face indicates total psychic withdrawal, representing a state in which the ego is unable to project the usual social mask. In this way, Dougie can be a metaphor for the psychiatric patient (“In the human world, only fools and children do not wear masks”^[13]). He represents how society casts its eyes down in the face of those struggling with mental illness or “otherness”; the exclusion in which the individual can only try to repeat the words of others to feel part of the community; or even depression — a typically inactive, low-confidence, stimulus-deprived state that does not favor creativity, as Lynch has often noted, and which once again connects him to art brut.

Staying with the example of Twin Peaks, the “Bob entity” is one of the purest manifestations of the Shadow — an uncontrolled id, the evil that becomes visible when the persona is shattered. Lynch uses Bob to illustrate the danger of over-identifying with a seemingly perfect social mask.

We can find countless other examples of this topic throughout Lynch’s work, and these are just a few suggestions from the many interpretations that can be applied to them. Lynch’s visual artworks cast the viewer into a state of controlled regression; through dreamlike scenes and bizarre imagery, they lead us toward a confrontation with universal archetypal symbols and the shadows of the collective psyche. He compels us to look behind our own masks through the masks of his characters, transforming the act of cultural consumption into a modern-day ritual that illuminates the raw reality hidden behind the veil of the everyday.

David Lynch: Up in Flames (curator: Otto M. Urban), DOX Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic, June 19, 2025–February 2, 2026.

Cover image: David Lynch in Prague (Photo: Karel Cudlin_©400ASA, 1996, courtesy of DOX.)

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^[1] Kristine McKenna: Painting is a Place. In: Stijn Huijts (ed.): David Lynch. Someone is in my House. Prestel Verlag, Munich–London–New York, 2018. 11–22. 19.

^[2] https://www.moma.org/artists/768-andre-breton

^[3] McKenna (2018) 15.

^[4] David Lynch: Catching the big fish. Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Tarcher, New York, 2016

^[5] Quote is from the wall text of Up in Flames

^[6] McKenna (2018) 12.

^[7] Bernd Herzogenrath: On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology. Other Voices 1/3, 1999. https://www.othervoices.org/1.3/bh/highway.php

^[8] Dr. David R. Hawkins (1927–2012) was an American psychiatrist, spiritual teacher, and researcher.

^[9] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11996462-confusion-is-our-salvation-for-the-confused-there-is-still

^[10] McKenna (2018) 12.

^[11] Lynch (2016) 1.

^[12] Hans Belting, Faces: A History of the Face, trans. Thomas S. Hansen, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017; Hungarian edition: Az arc története, trans. Károly Horváth, Budapest: Atlantisz, 2018.

^[13] Csorba Simon László: HOGYAN. 1999, Animula, Budapest, 56.