Artist's tribute to movie giants David Lynch, Orson Welles

French artist Bernard Piffaretti’s first exhibition in Shanghai kicks off today at the Lisson Gallery. 

The exhibit features a selection of colorful, dynamic new paintings, all created by the artist in his Parisian studio over the past year. The presentation highlights Piffaretti’s “moving image” style of painting and pays tribute to visionary filmmakers David Lynch and Orson Welles (1915-1985). 

Piffaretti has refined his “Piffaretti system” for decades. The new acrylic-on-canvas works is called “Untitled (2020),” and like the majority of Piffaretti’s oeuvre, they illustrate this method. 

The artist starts each painting by first drawing “the central mark,” a vertical line that divides the canvas into two equal sides, to establish a clear separation between left and right. He then creates an abstract composition of gestural marks on one side, and follows to recreate the image opposite, on the other side of the vertical line. 

However, Piffaretti doesn’t want to produce an ideal, symmetrical “mirror image,” instead, he purposely paints an inexact, doubled image that instantly challenges people’s perception and forces them to question what they are seeing. Because viewers don’t know which side the artist first painted on (left or right), they cannot identify which side is “right” or “wrong,” thus making each become an equally imperfect shadow of the opposite. As viewers actively try to decode the puzzle of the artist’s deliberate variations, it shows people’s psychological and emotional response to the “Piffaretti system.” 

The title of the exhibition, “Twin Peaks and Company,” was selected by Piffaretti as a tribute to filmmakers Lynch and Welles as, he says, “a kind of twin legacy.” 

“Twin Peaks,” directed by Lynch, was a famed American psychological thriller, which originally aired in 1990. Piffaretti, like Lynch, rose to fame in the 1980s, alongside the “high concept” era in cinematic style and the continuation of a filmmaker-driven format. The “Company” refers to Lynch’s forerunner, Welles, who greatly influenced Lynch in his approach to directing and with psychological effects. Piffaretti particularly highlights the film, “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947) which Lynch considered as a major influence on his work. 

The finale of this film features a unique climactic shoot-out in the “Magic Mirror Maze,” a hall of mirrors comprising a multitude of real and false images, where each face is repeated and mirrored numerous times. Piffaretti’s own exploration of visual language is mirrored in the works of Lynch and Welles. 

“I practice painting like one would process a moving picture. I see it as a moving situation,” he said. 

As we can see Piffaretti likes to adopt distortion, mystery, reflection and a deconstruction of images to illustrate a psychological effect in his works.

Courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Exhibition info

Date: Through May 29, Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-6pm

Venue: Lisson Gallery

Address: 2/F, 27 Huqiu Road