A man gazes into a mirror, his back turned to you, but his reflection also has its back turned to you. The Castle of the Pyrenees sits atop a great stone mountain, except that the mountain is egg-shaped and suspended over the sea in absolute defiance of gravity and the castle itself is made of the same stone as the mountain as if simply carved from the top of it. Some of his images have become familiar, but still have the power to give that delightful mental “twist”, and have in large part come to define what people think of when they use the word “surreal”. In painting after painting the conventions of reality, visual perception and representational art – time, space, gravity, proportion, perspective – one by one are turned on their heads. All the while, of course, old René is laughing up his bowler hat. Magritte invites you into a mystery with bizarre clues, hints of meaning and tantalizing associations and then makes a connection that turns your throbbing little brain upside-down in its brain pan and gives it a good cooking (with a dash of pepper). Suddenly your subconscious snaps its mental fingers and says “Ah-ha!”, but what the “ah-ha” actually is remains unclear. He takes a seat in the back of your brain and, like a 1940’s wire-and-plug telephone switchboard operator, begins to reroute associations between the expected and the unexpected. Magritte is about connections and disconnections. Unlike Dalí, who set out to shock, dazzle and bewilder, Magritte casts his spell more like a poet, with juxtapositions of images and scenes that don’t make sense on the surface, but do, undeniably, unfathomably, make sense unconsciously. His images are directly painted, with little fuss or ostentatious display of technical virtuosity. Never the accomplished painter or draughtsman that Dali was (but then, how many are?), Magritte’s ability to fascinate me lay in the psychological power of his imagery. (Contrary to the popular assumption, Surrealism was primarily a literary movement, not an art movement, and Breton, who wrote the Surrealist “manifestos” and was good friends with Magritte, was its center.)ĭalí, with his impressive old-master level of painting skills, propelled his fantastic images into hyper-real dream-state orbit, casting shimmering spells of wonder over my hungry teenage brain, but Magritte… ah, Magritte was more subtle. I would later come to enjoy the subtle brain-vibrating pleasures of Ernst, Duchamp, Man Ray, and other less well known Surrealist and Dada artists and also come to enjoy the writings of Andre Breton, Benjamin Peret and other Surrealist writers, but it was the “big two”, with their other-worldly, dream-like, disorienting and endlessly fascinating images that really had a hold on me. How could something so utterly and amazingly cool and strange and non-school-like exist on the shelves of the school library as if it were just as innocent as all of the other stuff that school managed to make so boring? Within weeks I was haunting the school and public libraries devouring every book on Surrealism I could find, with a particular fascination for Dalí and Magritte. I was hooked, a helpless Surrealism Junkie. The window, 1925 This painting as search for pleasure was followed next by a curious experience.For some reason that I have yet to understand, when I first accidentally encountered Surrealism as a young teen ager looking through the art books in the school library, the images I saw of paintings by Salvador Dalí and Rene Magritte just hit me like a lightning bolt, flashing a giant “Whoah! What is this?!” on my cranial billboard. My interest lies entirely in provoking an emotional shock. I cannot doubt that a pure and powerful sentiment, namely eroticism, saved me from slipping to the traditional chase after formal perfection. In a state of intoxication I set about creating busy scenes of stations, festivities or cities in which the little girl bound up in my discovery of the world of painting lived out an exceptional adventure. As a result of that joke I came to know a new way of painting. A singular fate willed that someone, probably to have fun at my expense, should send me the illustrated catalogue of an exposition of futurist paintings. In 1915 when I began to paint the memory of that enchanting encounter with the painter, turned my steps in a direction having little to do with common sense.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |