When David Lynch passed away last week, I was writing a little bit of an overview of this show, Canadian artist David Altmejd's "Prélude pour un nouvel ordre mondial" at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. It felt eerily apt and I stopped writing to look over the Lynchian universe, a bit of a gut punch to lose such an icon of Los Angeles in the wreckage of the fire disasters. Altmejd, to me, exists in this sort of post-Hollywood aesthetic, a juxtaposition of cultural and idyllic worlds mixed with the surreal and chaotic vision of modernity and post-humanism. In essence, while Altmejd’s sculptures manifest physical transformations in the medium of sculpture and invite viewers to engage with them spatially, Lynch’s films manifest narrative transformations that engage viewers cognitively and emotionally. Both are rooted in exploration of the human experience, inviting interpretations that delve into the strange and the profound.
So Altmejd makes me, and often has over the years, made me think of a manifestation of David Lynch, and that both had and have the capacity to evoke surrealism in a profound way. Sometimes you feel scared, sometimes ou have to laught. To me, Altmejd's work is about fantastical transformations, a dialogue about identity and the interplay between the biological and the supernatural. It feels like the perfect time to engage with the work once again. —Evan Pricco
