Joshua Paik

Written

The False Mirror of 1928 by Magritte is an image of a large, lash-less, eye, with a
sky filled iris and a matte black disk that doubles as its pupil. The lack of a
context, the entire canvas is just the eye, abstracts the eye from the work and
attributes the painting to its surrealist influences. Like many other Surrealist
artist, like Dali, Ray, and Ernst, Magrittes eye is decontextualized to make the
viewer feel uneasy and unsettles with the viewers complacent view on art. By
making the iris a cloud, Magritte is challenging the notion of perception; is what
the audience see a reflection of their own world view or is it that the sky is an
opening to their own reality.

In the same way that The False Mirror challenged the viewers perception, The
Palace of Curtains III of 1929 does the same thing. In this painting, the viewer is
shown two carefully painted images of a blank portrait, one the depiction of the
sky, and the other with the word ciel which means sky in French. Both images
depict the same thing, except one is an image and the other a word. However
both are representations of something that cannot be captured by a painting.
Because the viewer perceives there to be a sky without the sky being present,
Magritte is challenging the perception of the viewer that one can represent reality
with symbols. Just like a word is not the thing it represents, a painting is not the
thing it depicts, no matter the accuracy.

As Magritte challenged the notion of perception and reality, he is able to create
fantastical images, like The Menaced Assassin of 1927. In it, he depicts a dead
man, as his murderer takes a break to play some music, unaware of the assailants
waiting to attack him. This image, obviously fictional, is hyper realistic in its use
of paint techniques he used commercial paints in the blacks to show greater
spectrum of light whilst the shapes themselves are overly dramatic and sensual.
This romantic interpretation of a fictional scene, can make the viewer question
the place of reality in artwork, and whether reality serves a purpose. To Magritte,
it does not.