About reality, art, life

" The instant when you think you understand what you see, you're clobbered by the unexpected as in his 1933 painting, The Human Condition. " Jim Lane

"In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. This is how we see the world, we see it outside ourselves, and at the same time we only have a representation of it in ourselves. In the same way, we sometimes situate in the past that which is happening in the present. Time and space thus lose the vulgar meaning that only daily experience takes into account"

La Ligne de Vie II, February 1940

In a letter to André Breton, R.Magritte wrote of The Human Condition (1928) that it was irrelevant if the scene behind the easel differed from what was depicted upon it, "but the main thing was to eliminate the difference between a view seen from outside and from inside a room."The windows in some of these pictures are framed with heavy drapes, suggesting a theatrical motif. (from Wikipedia)

These paintings let us know better about us and the surrounding world and help us to reflect about art and life, life and reality, about what is and how it could appear.

R. Magritte, Golconde,1953