Untitled (La voix de l'absolu)

"When the Surrealist vision began to emerge in his work during the 1925-26 period, Magritte made a more figurative use of the collage, but in 1928, as soon as he realised what he could do in the given situation, he invented a totally original way of working. The nameless forms he then made bore words whose usual meaning became doubtful and problematical in the special context he created for them. The relationship he established between a nameless form and a noun removed from the world of names. Suzi Gablik.....has rightly seen that there is a remarkable connection between Wittgenstein's philosophical linguistic writings and Magritte's texts and those paintings which incorporate words. Both men sought to demonstrate the relative nature of our use of words. Their is no logical connection between what an object is and the name it has acquired; the name does not represent what the thing actually is. Freed from their customary names, objects return to their origins, to a state prior to being recorded in the various language groups. Language becomes divorced from its classical certainty. Magritte remains first a painter, however, and his intuitive insights about language and words were always directed toward defining the function he was seeking for his painting. He recorded these insights in relation to the "images" in his paintings, and when he did this he was not yet aware of modern linguistics. it was only much later, during the 1960s, that he enthusiastically read Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses..., noticing that an unconscious connection existed between his own activities as a Surrealist painter and the activities of linguistic philosophers like Foucault." (A.H. Hammacher, Ren Magritte, London 1974, pp. 30-32).

The phrase 'Une rose dans l'univers' appears at the head of a selection of quotations from writings on Magritte published for the 1954 Brussels Palais des Beaux Arts exhibition on Magritte under the title 'L'eau qui a coul sous le pont'. It is attributed there to Magritte. He used it as well in a letter to Rapin dated March 1956: "Similarly, there is a familiar sensation of mystery, felt in relation to those things which are conventionally referred to as mysterious. But the supreme sensation is the unfamiliar sensation of mystery, felt in relation to things which are conventionally considered to be 'natural' and familiar (our thought, among other things). The 'relationships' between things are abstract (forms?) of (thought?). The words: In, Between, For, As, etc. make the statutory exercising of thought really too easy. While it is easy to say: A rose in a garden, it is not easy to say (but is it a question of difficulty?): a rose in the Universe - because the word 'in' is no longer a piece of abstract information which puts our thought as it were outside itself, but an (idea?) within thought."