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Lot Essay
‘To name the image of a tree ‘Tree’ is an error, a ‘mistaken identity,’ since the image of a tree is assuredly not a tree. The image is separate from what it shows. What we can see that delights us in a painted image becomes uninteresting if what we are shown through the image is encountered in reality; and the contrary, too: what pleases us in reality, we are indifferent to in the image of this pleasing reality if we don’t confuse real and surreal, and surreal with subreal’
(Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 109).
La projection lumineuse is an exquisitely rendered gouache by René Magritte showing a plunging Romantic landscape. The cloud-dappled sky rolls over a plateau punctuated with trees, while mountains are shown in the distance through a bluish haze. In the foreground, adding to the poetry and romance of the scene, are the remains of a wall. Within this picturesque, evocative ruin is a frameless window. It is here that the viewer enters the Magrittean universe: through this opening, the same landscape is repeated in impossible miniature, even down to the cluster of saplings surrounding it, the mountains behind and the cloud formations above.
La projection lumineuse relates to another picture of the same title dated to 1954, the year that Magritte was granted his first major retrospective, held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. In that other work of the same title, a parallel composition is shown: a group of boats are seen together beyond a wall, within whose brickwork is an opening through which the same vista is repeated. In formal terms, the composition of each of the gouaches entitled La projection lumineuse echoes that of an oil painting also dating from 1954, La leçon des ténèbres. In that work, a still life of fruit is shown in a darkened room, while beyond a window placed to the left of the composition a landscape is shown in bright daylight. Thus, in La leçon des ténèbres, the artist uses the window as a means of toggling between two genres, in La projection lumineuse, it is employed in order to repeat, and therefore undermine, one.
In La projection lumineuse, Magritte presents the viewer with a paradox that deliberately, flagrantly and flamboyantly undermines the entire nature of representative painting. The validity of supposedly objective observations of the world around us is thrown into doubt. Magritte is shining a spotlight on the artifice inherent in art. At the same time, he is revealing both the futility of trying to show the world as we see it to others who may not share our perspectives, as well as the limitations to which we become accustomed through life, through education, through experience. Gradually, we close our minds to the infinite possibilities of life and of perception, relying on our eyes too much and our brains too little. In La projection lumineuse, Magritte is triggering thought, contemplation and imagination. He is inviting us to question what we see, and by doing so, is inciting a revelation, begging us to see the world as he did, in a series of revelations. In this way, La projection lumineuse masquerades as a traditional landscape in order to immerse the viewer in a world of mystery.
Magritte was adept at using the visual language of everyday life as his own arsenal in his continuous assaults on our understanding of the world around us. In La projection lumineuse, this is evident on a number of levels. Firstly, the picture shows stones, trees and mountains, elements to which most viewers are able to relate. Secondly, Magritte has represented them in a manner that itself has cultural and art historical ramifications. After all, with its melancholy ruins in the foreground and the plunging landscape in the background, La projection lumineuse clearly evokes works by artists such as the great German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich. Magritte deliberately lulls us into a place that appeared filled with the familiar in order to make his dismantling of our preconceptions all the more extreme. In a letter written to André Bosmans in 1959, Magritte discussed some of his thoughts regarding painting in terms that apply to La projection lumineuse: ‘words such as unreal, unreality, imaginary, seem unsuited to a discussion of my painting. I am not in the least curious about the “imaginary,” nor about the “unreal”. For me, it’s not a matter of painting “reality” as though it were readily accessible to me and to others, but of depicting the most ordinary reality in such a way that this immediate reality loses its tame or terrifying character and finally presents itself with its mystery. Understood in this way, that reality has nothing “unreal” or “imaginary” about it’ (Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 70).
The exploration of visual reality and of painting that underpins the internal logic of La projection lumineuse relates to that of one of Magritte’s early masterpieces, La condition humaine of 1933, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In that work, a painting is shown on an easel by a window. The picture perfectly and impossibly superimposes the features outside the window upon the landscape beyond, creating an uncanny continuity. In La projection lumineuse, Magritte has again played with the idea of the representation of landscape, but through the device of showing the smaller version through the window of the tumbledown wall so aesthetically placed in the foreground. In this, he appears to have created a fractal, a sequence that in theory could recede ad infinitum, with another window just out of shot showing the same miniature landscape, and within that another, and within that…
(Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 109).
La projection lumineuse is an exquisitely rendered gouache by René Magritte showing a plunging Romantic landscape. The cloud-dappled sky rolls over a plateau punctuated with trees, while mountains are shown in the distance through a bluish haze. In the foreground, adding to the poetry and romance of the scene, are the remains of a wall. Within this picturesque, evocative ruin is a frameless window. It is here that the viewer enters the Magrittean universe: through this opening, the same landscape is repeated in impossible miniature, even down to the cluster of saplings surrounding it, the mountains behind and the cloud formations above.
La projection lumineuse relates to another picture of the same title dated to 1954, the year that Magritte was granted his first major retrospective, held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. In that other work of the same title, a parallel composition is shown: a group of boats are seen together beyond a wall, within whose brickwork is an opening through which the same vista is repeated. In formal terms, the composition of each of the gouaches entitled La projection lumineuse echoes that of an oil painting also dating from 1954, La leçon des ténèbres. In that work, a still life of fruit is shown in a darkened room, while beyond a window placed to the left of the composition a landscape is shown in bright daylight. Thus, in La leçon des ténèbres, the artist uses the window as a means of toggling between two genres, in La projection lumineuse, it is employed in order to repeat, and therefore undermine, one.
In La projection lumineuse, Magritte presents the viewer with a paradox that deliberately, flagrantly and flamboyantly undermines the entire nature of representative painting. The validity of supposedly objective observations of the world around us is thrown into doubt. Magritte is shining a spotlight on the artifice inherent in art. At the same time, he is revealing both the futility of trying to show the world as we see it to others who may not share our perspectives, as well as the limitations to which we become accustomed through life, through education, through experience. Gradually, we close our minds to the infinite possibilities of life and of perception, relying on our eyes too much and our brains too little. In La projection lumineuse, Magritte is triggering thought, contemplation and imagination. He is inviting us to question what we see, and by doing so, is inciting a revelation, begging us to see the world as he did, in a series of revelations. In this way, La projection lumineuse masquerades as a traditional landscape in order to immerse the viewer in a world of mystery.
Magritte was adept at using the visual language of everyday life as his own arsenal in his continuous assaults on our understanding of the world around us. In La projection lumineuse, this is evident on a number of levels. Firstly, the picture shows stones, trees and mountains, elements to which most viewers are able to relate. Secondly, Magritte has represented them in a manner that itself has cultural and art historical ramifications. After all, with its melancholy ruins in the foreground and the plunging landscape in the background, La projection lumineuse clearly evokes works by artists such as the great German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich. Magritte deliberately lulls us into a place that appeared filled with the familiar in order to make his dismantling of our preconceptions all the more extreme. In a letter written to André Bosmans in 1959, Magritte discussed some of his thoughts regarding painting in terms that apply to La projection lumineuse: ‘words such as unreal, unreality, imaginary, seem unsuited to a discussion of my painting. I am not in the least curious about the “imaginary,” nor about the “unreal”. For me, it’s not a matter of painting “reality” as though it were readily accessible to me and to others, but of depicting the most ordinary reality in such a way that this immediate reality loses its tame or terrifying character and finally presents itself with its mystery. Understood in this way, that reality has nothing “unreal” or “imaginary” about it’ (Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 70).
The exploration of visual reality and of painting that underpins the internal logic of La projection lumineuse relates to that of one of Magritte’s early masterpieces, La condition humaine of 1933, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In that work, a painting is shown on an easel by a window. The picture perfectly and impossibly superimposes the features outside the window upon the landscape beyond, creating an uncanny continuity. In La projection lumineuse, Magritte has again played with the idea of the representation of landscape, but through the device of showing the smaller version through the window of the tumbledown wall so aesthetically placed in the foreground. In this, he appears to have created a fractal, a sequence that in theory could recede ad infinitum, with another window just out of shot showing the same miniature landscape, and within that another, and within that…