|
Thought Rendered Visible
|
|
|
Space thus emerged between the
visible and its manifestations, on the one hand, and the invisible and
thought, on the other - space for a reflective alliance between the
images and their meaning. Magritte included this pact of uncertainties
and wonders in his pictures. It is a pact with the devil, however,
since the signatories are so incompatible and so heterogeneous in
nature that a merging of or clash between the two does not even give
rise to contradiction. The squaring of a circle at least requires the
presence of two geometrical figures, yet there exist no points of
reference or links whatever between what one says and what one sees,
between the logic of discourse and the figuration of what is visible.
One is quite aware that the sun is no big red disc some two hundred
metres away; nevertheless, there are some summer evenings when it at
least seems to be such.
A mysterious element is present in
the most natural manifestation of objects, invincible and totally
resistant to established concepts. It radiates the impossibility of
reducing the visible to the logos, possessing precisely that
all-encompassing dimension that distinguishes the world of Magritte's
pictures, the anchorage which he never relinquished. One could
even say that he settled upon this very heterogeneity of
reflection and reflex, of speculation and mirror-image, in order
to resolve the mutual exclusion of seeing and thinking on the
metaphysical surface of the canvas. His works display the
unconsidered within the visual.
The
bells worn by the horses in Charleroi in the first half of the
century, when portrayed floating in mid-air and greatly enlarged,
reveal an exciting magic and poetry (The Voice of the Winds).
|
|
|
The objects of painting are free of the ties which exist
between things in the everyday world. On the contrary, they possess an
artificial power and a more than physical potential, demonstrating an
urge to drift away such as is characteristic of thought itself- with
the proviso that thought is nothing other than an active and intensive
confrontation with the unthinkable. The word "magic" comes from the
Persian, and has the same root as the German word mogen (in
turn related to the English verb form "may" as in "maybe", in the
sense of "possibly be able to"). It characterizes the possibility of
penetrating every form, every identity, without submitting to a
binding association with any of them. Is the body of the dove turning
into clouds? Or are the fantastic clouds becoming a bird? The Large
Family) of poetic forces refers to the fusion of
heavenly powers, the fusion of clouds and birds, while The
Discovery of Fire is surely captivated by the birth
of its own mystery, since the flames which we see painted here are
feeding upon something quite impossible. In Magritte's picture
Manet's Balcony, the place of the gentleman in black
and the young ladies dressed in white has been
taken by the symbols of their death. Coffins have adopted the sitting
or standing poses assigned the figures by Manet.
|
The Voice of the Winds
1928
The horses in both Charleroi
and Brussels onece wore bells around their necks,
the sound of which
left a lasting impression upon the painter.
In allowing these bells to
float freely in mid-air, exposed to the winds,
he is imparting
pictorial embodiment to audible perception.
|
The Voice of Space
|
The Large Family
1963
Is the body of the dove turning into
clouds?
Or are the fantastic clouds becoming
a bird?
|
The Discovery of Fire
1934
Fire as mystery, as a force
devouring everything before it without exception.
Fire has always had
a central significance and fascination, in every culture and every
age.
The flames appear to be taking their course quite unhindered, as
if the tuba were made of wood.
|
Perspective II: Manet's Balcony
1950
The figures in Manet's picture have been replaced in that of Magritte by coffins;
otherwise, the scene remains unchanged.
The place of the living is
taken by dead objects,
which -shockingly - would seem to represent the
humans equally well.
|
Perspectiva I: Madame Recamier de David
|
Time Transfixed
|
|
Does the picture not
refer to the inorganic, death-bringing character of painting? Is
Magritte not practically insisting upon this - and therefore
simultaneously upon the freedom and the very special nature of life
that is inherent in art? There is no flesh, no sex, in painting, yet
this de-sexualized world is imbued with a quite different kind of
sensuality and energy. Leaving the realm of sorrow and joy, we enter
the world of creative works and aesthetic inventions. Accordingly,
The Seducer is no ship; rather, the sea looks like a
ship. The same is true of the pictures Golconda
and The Month of the Grape Harvest, where Magritte
is playing with the concept of multiplying identical figures, in order
to demonstrate that the social identity of people cannot appeal to a
solid foundation. Fantomas could be hiding in each of them, in some,
in only one, or in none. Poetry can be everywhere and nowhere, but one
must first be placed in the position and discover the prerequisites
necessary for being disturbed and confused - by a visual experience,
for example - before one can then sense the depths, the bottomless
nature, lurking in the deepest core of things, in those principles
that seem most sound. Magritte's art is the revenge of poetry upon the
power of blind technology, the revenge of philosophical thought, of
questioning, open thought, in contrast to firmly established
certainties and dogmas of whatever inclination. The "leaders", the
demagogues, the prophets of a radiant future, are nothing else than
dangerous Cicerones, their mouths spewing forth not thoughts or words
but fire and lead. Magritte's picture The Cicerone
lends a subversive political aspect to the famous jointed dolls of de Chirico's
metaphysical painting. While the mystery of the world is ultimately
invincible, it is nonetheless only too vulnerable to greed and the
lust for power.
|
The Seducer
1953
The observer is seduced by an idea
which is poetic and plausible at the same time,
that of an object
taking on the substance of the material in which it feels itself at
home.
Here, accordingly, the ship is constructed of water, thereby
becoming a
kind of "castle in the air" of Magritte's painting and
world of ideas.
|
Les merveilles de la
Nature
|
Golconda
1953
"There is a crowd of men here,
different men. When you think of a crowd, however, you don't think of
an individual;
accordingly, these men arc all dressed alike, as simply
as possible, so as to suggest a crowd ...
Golconda was a wealthy
Indian city, something like a wonder.
I consider it a wonder that I
can walk through the sky on the earth.
On the other hand, the bowler
hat constitutes no surprise - it is a quite unoriginal article of
headgear.
The man in the bowler hat is Mr. Average in his anonymity.
I, too, wear one; I have no great desire to stand out from the
masses." Rene Magritte
|
The Month of the Grape Harvest
1959
Here too, as in
Golconda, appear the anonymous, interchangeable, bowler-hatted
men.
They are hermetically obstructing the view out of the window;
thereby acquiring an almost threatening expression despite their
passivity.
|
The Cicerone
1947
The verbose and imperious guide sets
both direction and path.
A reflective pause would not correspond to
its structure.
Under its domination, technology and politics are
accordingly characterized by the same absurd barbarism.
|
Los encuentros naturales
|
Elementary Cosmogony
|
|
Life, the greatest mystery of them
all, is threatened and damaged by forces from science and politics,
forces regarding themselves as chosen and empowered to supervise and
run this life - that is, to dominate and manipulate it. The
picture The Pleasure Principle is a portrait of
Edward James, the English collector, after a very fine photograph by
Man Ray. A simple explosion of light, a violent electric flash, has
taken the place of the face, of the revealed soul. Magritte has
substituted the simple truth of his art for the effects of
representation, reproduction, and repetition typical of this
technique. He is demonstrating that the photographic snapshot, rather
than recognizing reality, in fact represents a mechanical operation
and manipulation such as transforms light and shadow into a deceptive
illusion. He is conducting a dialogue, not with the head of Edward
James (who, incidentally, was the model for Not To Be Reproduced, too) but rather with the art of photography.
Magritte himself was a first-rate photographer. He is uncovering the
mystery of photographic reproduction, giving it an ironic
interpretation by placing the stone on the other side and exchanging
the position of the right and the left hands, at the same time
shifting them very slightly.
|
The Pleasure Principle (Portrait
of
Edward James)
1937
While working on the portrait of
Edward James after a photograph by Man Ray.
Magritte substituted the
explosion of light produced by a camera flash device for the face of
his model,
thereby - as so often - mocking and demonstrating the
principle of unreality lying behind a picture.
|
|
The Liberator
1947
The pictures of a key, a bird, a
pipe and a glass, portrayed in isolation on a board,
have the effect
of mysterious, enigmatic signs. We can name them individually;
however, their deeper significance is hidden on the other side of the
depiction,
within the imagination of the respective observer.
|
Le therapeute
|
|
|
Headlessness has been inflicted upon
the model in a portrait that is not "drawn forward", as the Latin
root
-protrahere - says, but seems rather to have been pushed back,
driven by the canvas through the canvas itself, through the light of
what is visible, which always has the tendency more to hide than to
uncover and reveal. Magritte never ceased in his concern to
demonstrate that what we see is in fact concealing something from us,
while what is invisible is for its part incapable of remaining hidden,
its nature being such that it perforce cannot be shown. It is even
possible to show that it cannot be shown, by ordering the visible
figures in such a way that the limits of what is visible can be
appreciated. Painting alone cannot cross these limits, however. The
Pleasure Principle portrays the principle of painting
as a sensory statement full of abstract realities, the inverting and
perverting of the customary world in favour of the more real world -
not that world inhabited by those who lay down commandments and
prohibitions, but rather a mysterious and unimaginable world, an appeal, a promise, which
art and thought seek to answer and fulfil. Asked by Charles Flamand,
the journalist, if he often thought of death, Magritte replied: "No,
not more often than of life."
|
El castillo en los pirineos
|
La flecha de Zenon
|
La gran mesa
|
Recuerdo de viaje
|
Souvenir of a Journey III
1955
|
Recuerdo de viaje
|
The Song of the Violet
|
The Endearing truth
|
The Idol
|
|
In his own words, Magritte lived
"like everything else" in the mystery of the world. Instead of
seeking a more or less new and original manner of painting, or
inventing new techniques, he preferred to get to the bottom of things,
to use painting as the instrument of thinking and philosophical
wisdom, as a means of recognition inseparably bound up with mystery,
with the inexplicable. Magritte led an unobtrusive and bourgeois life.
He only bore the intolerably commonplace character of modern life by
slipping apparently effortlessly between habits of speech and vision,
then to trace them back quite calmly and casually to that passionate
absoluteness of mystery which is closed to popular judgements and
perceptions. After due consideration, he decided that he - like Marcel
Duchamp - could only be an "an-artist", a painter breaking with the
superficial sensualist platitudes that lead us to believe in the
existence of flesh and blood where there are in fact merely paint and
lines, or even nothing more than "a heap of rags on the wall", as
Magritte wrote to Rauschenberg. He despised artists who became
prisoners of their talent and virtuosity, detested an ability that was
merely technical and fixated upon materials. His constant and sole
concern was with thought in pictures, with no preconceived ideas, no
concepts - thought in an exclusively visual sphere, one nevertheless
stimulated by the intellect and metaphysics.
|
|
|
Rene Magritte
|
|
We do not possess the words with
which to express and imagine the mystery of "being", but since
Magritte we do have pictures showing how much we lack the thoughts,
how much the mind aims at the impossible, but also that it is
nonetheless possible never to have to do without the impossible. Will
we ever be capable of internalizing Magritte's work, capable of The
Labours of Alexander? Will man one day be master of
his destiny? There are sufficient reasons for scepticism. Yet with the
help of Magritte's pictures, we can at least survive in thought beyond
despair and hope, by experiencing the mystery of meaning as
inseparable from - but not reducible to - the senses. Meaning develops
from a multitude of sensory powers: those of the hands, the ears, the
mouth (when speaking, of course, and not when eating). But man cannot
maintain that he has control of all these powers. Rather, he realizes
himself in them all in linking them to one another. When you see,
you are not reading, and nor are you listening, yet without the
complex of the other senses, or at least certain other senses which
support sight - others being excluded through an internal process -
you would be unable to see anything. None of our senses can
function on its own. Not until sight includes the body do we really
see; yet the unit "body" is by no means at the service of sight alone.
Rather, it represents an irregular multiplicity, a field of the most
different forces and possibilities which gradually releases one
potential after another.
|
Thee Labours of Alexander
1967
The root of the freshly
felled tree is reaching for the axe, holding on to it.
Once again, it
is artistic poetry which renders possible the impossible.
|
|
Magritte's art demonstrates to the
eye and the intellect the highly uncertain character of everything
making up the realm of the visible. He enrols in the register of the
visible, offering the eye of the observer certain movements and
associations such as have settled in the depths of the body. However,
this revelation of that which is hidden and latent never takes place
in a manner contradictory to visual perception. On no account did
Magritte allow the technical level of his work to take on a purely
aesthetic surface effect. He considered it neither possible nor
desirable that the material preconditions of a work should disturb the
utterly immaterial, incorporeal meaning which they have produced. It
is not the painter's concern to deny physical or socio-psychological
determined-ness; rather, he wishes to rob it of its meaning in favour
of an artificial, poetic, new meaning which provides
fertile soil for the uncertain, the mysterious.
|
|
The meaning inherent in Magritte's
work touches directly on the "Anarchy of the senses" to which
Rimbaud's poetry bears witness. Those forces which support the visible
remain concealed behind it; only painting is capable of rendering them
visible. This process does not simply happen: instead, painting
actively sets in motion a metamorphosis by means of which it changes
and alters these forces solely through the fact that it is depicting
them. What matters, Magritte liked to say, is not that the copy should
be similar to the model, but that the model should have the courage to
resemble its copy. Put another way, it is essential to understand that
art does not take up a meaning already inherent in reality; quite the
reverse, it is art which confers meaning upon reality by opening up
previously undreamt-of paths which - despite and because of its
abstract nature - present life with new horizons. Magritte's power and
strength lie in his ability to maintain the demand for and necessity
of sense in a world which has ceased to be conscious of this desire.
|
El vestido de noche
|
El maestro de escuela
|
Lo spirito d'avventura
|
The Son of Man
|
Le fils de l'homme
|
The Man in
the Bowler Hat
1964
|
High society
|
|
|
|
