| Artist: | Magritte, Rene |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Key of Dreams | |
| Date of Work: | 1930 | |
| Nationality: | Belgian | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: In the "Key of Dreams," the signifier and the signified don't match up; word and concept don't agree. Under the picture of the shoe, for instance, is the French word for "moon," and under the black bowler hat is the French word for "snow." In this slippage between signifier and signified, Magritte points out the artificiality of the pictorial sign and the instability of language as a communicating system. What is the link between a word and the object, idea, or feeling it identifies? Signifiers take on meaning only by convention, not by any natural law or firm connection to the external world or the thing itself; there is no absolute foundation underlying language or sign systems. "Pain" in English signifies a hurt or suffering of some kind; in French, the very same signifier, "pain," means bread. As usual, Magritte's art makes us question the reality we take for granted. He messes with the system of things: his art points to an underlying disturbance rather than an underlying order (Mondrian). Style: Magritte uses a realistic style to de-rail or sabotage reality. He employs a lucid dream technique by using an almost trompe-l'oeil style that on the surface seems innocent enough, but that covertly undermines the reality we take for granted. Without interfering with the shape of things, he interferes with the system of things. He is precisionist in technique, using a seemingly straightforward, descriptive, textbook style, not unlike a child's primer, but his content is always a disturbing riddle. Precision, rather than alleviating fear, ends up being the cause of added fear and apprehension. Trompe-l'oeil (trick of the eye) and trompe-l'esprit (trick of the mind) become his strategies for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to viewing reality. And reality, as a result, turns out to be a much more complicated thing than we might have suspected. Magritte's highly realistic images end up undermining the authority and certainty of an external world; we start to suspect that the world might only be an extension of what is taking place inside our own heads. "We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves." Magritte pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic with no way to resolve the conflict. He is determined to fight reason with its own weapons. Reason always tries to make things determinate, to pin them down definitively. His pictures resemble dreams of reason with a frightening precision that ends up backfiring, throwing reason itself, and reality, into question. Quite simply, he creates picture puzzles that cannot be solved or destroyed by reason alone. Context: Magritte is a surrealist in the way his puzzling images undermine reason, language, and the reality we take for granted. His realistic style and surreal content place him in the camp of Dali and others who use reality against itself, as opposed to the more abstract dream imagery of Miro. Magritte lived in France for 3 years and was an active participant in Surrealism. His work is sometimes called "Magic Realism" in the way his precisionist, trompe-l'oeil style yields puzzling pictures that reason alone can neither solve or destroy. As with all the surrealists, his work touches on how reality itself might only be a dream and, conversely, how our dreams and desires are the stuff of which reality is made. "If the dream is a transcription of waking life, waking life is also a transcription of the dream." | ||
