Barcelona
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The pipe wasn’t actually a pipe, so this isn’t an exhibit either. Much less a retrospective. Because with Magritte, the magician of surrealism who filled the history of art with apples and bowler hats, with indigo skies and words with multiple meanings, nothing is what it seems. So what is presented as the first major exhibition dedicated to the Belgian illusionist in more than two decades is actually something else. Namely: an attempt to map the brain of René Magritte (1898-1967), mapping his ecstatic singularity and deciphering the source code of his creativity. «We do not reveal the enigma, but we do allow a glimpse of the mechanisms and gears of his imagination», explains Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Thyssen Museum and curator of an exhibition that
arrives at Caixaforum Barcelona after premiering in Madrid last September.
They have taken the challenge of getting into his head so much to heart that even the room, with its curved walls, mirrored edges and those doors turned into evocative silhouettes, tries to reproduce Magritte’s brain; that world “full of connections and labyrinths”. A thinking and ‘painting’ head that, Solana details, worked by applying methods of variation and opposition. «In her work there is a systematization of delusion, a method parallel to what Dalí called critical paranoia”, explains the curator. “Arrange a delusion logically,” he adds.
freedom and risk
At Caixaforum, all this translates into an alternative tour of the work of this “unique surrealist”, in Solana’s words, which doubles or triples the bet of the great retrospective that was seen in 1998 at the Miró Foundation. «At that time Magritte was a novelty, a canonical exhibition had to be presented. Now we have had more freedom; when you do a second big exhibition you have to risk more”, justifies the curator. Hence, the exhibition borders the chronological narrative and the accumulation of masterpieces to focus on the “methodical nature” of his production from 69 paintings that came from fifty museums and collections in Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan. .
«Magritte is a methodical artist who returns again and again to certain motifs, and we have tried to bring them together in large thematic blocks», Solana relativizes when threading the common thread of an exhibition whose title, ‘The Magritte machine’, refers directly to repetition, variation and combination. Also, of course, to that ‘Universal machine for making pictures’ with which the Belgian surrealists fantasized in ‘La Manufacture de Poésie’ of 1950.
the art of thinking
«Since my first exhibition, in 1926, I have painted a thousand pictures, but I have not conceived more than a hundred of these images. These thousand paintings are the result of frequently painting variants of my images: it is my way of better specifying the mystery, of possessing it better”, Magritte himself said, words that now serve to introduce an exhibition that adds to the works seen in Madrid two new pieces: ‘The meaning of realities’ and ‘The rape’.
Illusionist of the brushes and superhero with more aces up his sleeve and tricks in his hat than supernatural powers, Magritte defined his painting as an art of thinking, a maxim that guides this exhibition that delves into concepts such as the mismatch between reality and language, coexistence of the animate and the inanimate and the problematic relationship with identity.
Ideas that, like the paradox, the influence of collage or the painting within the painting, jump from canvas to canvas following a thematic journey that begins with serious or ironic self-portraits such as ‘Attempt at the impossible’ and ‘The Magician’, and culminates with that megalomania resulting from “wanting to make the most familiar objects howl.” There emerges, imposing, the floating boulder of ‘The sense of realities’, the final touch of an exhibition that stops at Magritte’s ‘tableaux-mots’, paintings that combine words and figurative images in apparent contradiction; he indulges in the game of trimming and overlapping with works such as ‘La alta society’ and ‘The amorous perspective’; and sublimates the trompe l’oeil by the hand of ‘The beautiful captive’, ‘The walks of Euclides’ and other paintings trapped within paintings.
Mimicry
Faces, masks and examples of mimicry such as ‘The future of statues’, with Napoleon’s funerary mask merging with a cloudy blue sky, or ‘El seducer’, with a ship formed from the foam of the waves, complete a portrait that also deviates from the artistic to sneak into the intimacy of the creator through photographs and home movies. “They help us establish relationships between the life of the artist and his creations,” Solana points out about some snapshots in which he appears in uniform doing military service in Beverlo as well as posing next to his wife Georgette.
Additional information to complete this walk through the head of Magritte who seeks to vindicate the Belgian, even more so if possible, as a key piece of surrealism. «He is a unique surrealist, sometimes in conflict with Paris. He retains the freshness of Dadaism. He is the one who determines what surrealism is today. Movements change in their historical perception as some artists grow and others decline. So surrealism is Dalí, Miró and Magritte before André Breton”, highlights Solana.