Art Of The Day Weekly

Magritte, the power of the image

PARIS - "He's a man who thinks by images", according to curator Didier Ottinger. Very good description actually: Magritte's paintings are printed in our memories with the collection of fetishist objects - veils, curtains, drapes, bells and pipes. The exhibition brings together an impressive selection, on loan from museums all over the world, among them le Jockey perdu from 1927, le Blanc-seing from 1965, which wraps up the exhibition, the unforgetable Ceci n’est pas une pipe as well as his bright coloured works from the "période vache" (difficult period. The exhibit pretends Magritte was not only a painter (he never had a workshop but simply spread a carpet in his living room to set up his easel) and was not only an Impressionist. He is most probably, above all a philosopher who explored the themes of reality, dreams, the subconscience, with brushes and tubes of paint. He had a very cinematographic, synthetic, flat vision of our stay on earth. "I could see the world as if it were a curtain placed in front of my eyes": it is the best definition of the artist's work, by Magritte himself.
• Magritte, la trahison des images, at Centre Pompidou, 21 September 2016 to 23 January 2017.

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