A READER'S JOURNAL, Volume 1:
Magritte was a communicator who used the paint medium for his channel of expression. In this comprehensive exposition of his work Gablik lets Magritte's paintings and his words do the talking with her commentary acting as mortar to hold the structure together.
As an artist Magritte contributed as much to our understanding of perception as Adelbert Ames did as a scientist. In a systematic attack on the components of perception, Magritte forged paintings within paintings, birds that grew like leaves, a mermaid with her top half a fish and bottom half a woman, broken windows with scenery painted on the shards, a picture of a pipe with a sign saying "This is not a pipe", a fish made of rock sitting among the rocks on a seashore, a wine bottle that is half carrot, a horse and jockey on top of a car in full gallop, a woman's face that is shaped like a woman's torso, a violin with a bow-tie and collar, and a steeple that matches a street receding into the distance. Every step of his painting career Magritte challenged the eyes of his beholders, presenting them his paintings as a question, and teasing their sense of reality. What is real and what is illusion are blended into a moving boundary that pulls away from our feet the trap door that is perception so that we find ourselves standing in mid-air, our feet dangling, waiting for a precipitous drop like the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.
In my daughter's senior project in Fine Art at the University of New Orleans, I suggested that she include a Magritte inspired artwork in her "Jim Lentini Pondering" paintings. To see the Magritte influence, simply check the difference between the two dolphin paintings she did in the series. The first one is Jim Lentini as a young man looking at a dolphin. The second one is Jim Lentini as an old man looking at a dolphin. Compare the second Lentini painting with Magritte's Le musée du roi 1966 .
Always his paintings force us to look, to think, to perceive, to question the reality of the painting before us and the reality of our life outside the painting: the-everything-else-but-the-painting that brings us to view the painting. Raising many questions, Magritte offers few answers. Like Socrates he expects that asking the right questions is his job, arriving at the answers is ours. He has left a legacy of questions that will require many lifetimes to be fully answered.
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