It is no longer apples and oranges, but apples transforming into oranges and oranges that are actually green and red. Where is the line? Is there one - or is that also just "perceived"? Perceptions are only perceptions until they become reality. A number so titanic, it makes our current worldview feel so microscopically limited. This number confronts what the human mind can comprehend, a number that is hypnotic in its scale. There are 6402364363415443600995503674052849007 possible combinations of letters that can be expressed out of the 26-letters in the English alphabet, most of which have no meaning whatsoever. If someone pointed at it and asked you what it was, would you still answer "a tower" or would you say "it was a tower, now it’s a pile of rubble"? Our reality is defined by text in a dictionary, written by God-knows-who. All the pieces are still there: the concrete, the steel, the glass. A tower is a tower when it is free-standing. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." We only perceive objects in terms of their purposes. we explain the world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. John Berger opens and closes his defining work Ways of Seeing with two paintings by the Belgian surrealist commenting that, "seeing comes before words. There are no longer any ordinary things." As poet Paul Nougé once said after seeing an early Magritte exhibition: "The world has been altered. I think the world needed Magritte to truly introduce surrealism.
#Magritte faceless portraits trial#
This breach of reality in his work personifies the unknowable, shatter-glass reality objects not separated from, "the mystery to which nothing can be compared, and without which no thought or world would be possible." Highlighting the human mind’s limits and blind spots, Magritte’s Morphean visions put all traditional, rational signs and symbols on trial to make "everyday objects shriek out loud" and "challenge the real world", destabilising our sense of self and the links between representation and reality. His canvases carry a playful scepticism when it comes to "finding meaning" in art and beyond – that the obviousness of the signs surrounding us is in fact an illusion. Maybe in this artificiality is where the "Magrittean logic" was born: this irreality so present in his paintings. Before he was an artist, Magritte painted advertising posters and made forgeries of Chirico, Braque, and Picasso (even going to such lengths as printing fake money to survive in desperate financial times).
0 kommentar(er)
