see Magritte’s Treachery of Images
see Magritte’s Empire of Light
RENÉ MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967), a leading member of the Surrealists, caught my attention in high school, when I was old enough to drive an hour and a half to the nearest city and flip through racks of posters at malls. Such confusing but engaging imagery caught my eye there. Boxer hat-wearing men with apples floating in front of their faces? Trees with windows showing a hint of an everyday home inside? Humongous boulders floating, unmoving, over the ocean? Lovers standing cheek to cheek with sacks over their heads? Men looking in mirrors, and in the reflection, they see our vantage point of the backs of their own heads? Humongous apples or combs completely taking up the space of tiny bedrooms? I didn’t know what to make of these confusing images, but I couldn’t shake the imagery either. Surrealism sought to capture the reality of dreams and the unconscious mind. Magritte depicted ordinary objects in unusual contexts, or paired with things incongruously, challenging the viewer’s preconceptions of reality. His art and ideas have influenced pop, minimalism, and conceptual art, and Film Director William Friedkin says that his own iconic scene of the priest arriving at the home of the possessed child, in the Exorcist (1973), was an homage to Magritte’s Empire of Light.
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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