Its not always easy to find the writings of painters after theyve died, and often when I do, their conviction takes my breath away. Here, buried in the back of Suzi Gabliks monograph, is René #Magritte reflecting on his early development: Believing that it was possible to have the world I loved at my disposal if ever I succeeded in establishing its essence on canvas, I undertook to search for its plastic equivalents. The result was a serious of very evocative images, but abstract and inert, and interesting, in the final analysis, only to the intelligence of the eye... In 1925 I decided to break with this passive attitude as a direct result of an intolerable meditation in a popular saloon in Brussels: the mouldings of a door seemed to me to be endowed with a mysterious existence, and for a long time I was in touch with their reality. A feeling bordering upon terror was the departure for a willed action upon the real, for a transformation of life. Finding the same will, moreover, in the works of Marx and Engels, but allied to a superior method and doctrine, and making the acquaintance, about the same time, of the Surrealists who were violently demonstrating their loathing of all bourgeois values, both social and ideological, that have maintained the world in its present ignoble condition, I became certain that I would need to live with danger, so that the world, and life, would correspond more closely to thought and to feeling. I made paintings where the objects were represented with the appearance they have in reality, in a style sufficiently objective so that the subversive effect, which they would reveal themselves capable of evoking through certain powers, might exist again in the real world from which these objects had been borrowed -- by a perfectly natural exchange.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 23:55:20 +0000
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