RENÉ MAGRITTE: NAVIGATING THE ENIGMA
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
René Magritte
Оn the 20th-century art scene, few figures loom as provocatively as the Belgian surrealist René François Ghislain Magritte. His works, marked by juxtaposing the mundane with the surreal, are a curious and colorful inquiry into the nature of perception, reality, and representation.
This inquiry finds compelling expression in his 1928 masterpiece "Le Palais des Rideaux" (The Palace of Curtains). Painted during a stay in Paris, the melting pot of avant-garde art, "Le Palais des Rideaux" shows Magritte's ability to transform the familiar into vessels of profound ambiguity and allure.
Four humanlike – but not quite human – figures, standing out sharply against a golden background, at the boundary between the known and the unknown, each encircled by tube-like contour, like four portals into four different worlds.
A desert.
A forest.
A luscious skyscape.
And between them – a dark curtain. Into the theatre of life?
You can wonder about what is imagined and what is real. Is it about the reality of appearances or the appearance of reality? What really is inside, and what is outside? What do we have here: reality, or a dream? If a dream is a revelation of waking life, waking life is also a revelation of a dream.
René Magritte
Magritte's artistic method involves placing ordinary items into unexpected contexts. He saw painting as a technique where the juxtaposition of colors blurs the lines between their actual appearance, merging familiar scenes and objects into a harmoniously poetic composition.
His fascination with illusion, reality, and the spaces between them is often linked with the personal tragedy of his mother's early death. This speculative insight is sometimes used by art critics to explain the artist's recurring motifs of absence, presence, and the oscillation between the two.
For Magritte, the canvas become the means of infinite possibility. His manipulation of collage techniques and surface texture, the anthropomorphic characters of "Le Palais des Rideaux", with their enigmatic guts, forge a visceral connection between the viewer and the viewed.
Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.
Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Earrings by Hemmerle: the shadows of mystical mountains and with frosty plants on an early spring morning.
