Art for Away from Home

Les Valeurs Personnelles 

(Personal Values 1952) 

Magritte 

On the right, you see the Magritte you've always known; on the left, you see the Magritte I really like. O.K. I like both, but I tend to love the rarely known so as to feed my vanity.

Note on the right (Le Mal du Pays i. e., Homesickness, 1940) that the lion's subtle but unusual move--he is showing his left fore paw. In most stories, when big felines show their paws, they are most likely in pain and in need of timely removal of a thorn or a splinter. The story of Androcles and similar narratives all help reveal such hidden pain in the royal, stately body.

In contrast, a human figure with raven-black wings is facing off toward the yonder. The wings, the suit, and the fine shoes with a sleek hair. Could this be a modern version of the slick Mephistopheles or Lucifer? After all, in the story of homesickness, no one else had stayed away from home longer than the fallen angels.

For timely help with treatment, the lion has to leave home; for eternal punishment of exile, the devil has to abandon home. Of course, an art professor might quote Magritte and say, "No, it can't be the devil because he doesn't paint vision." It then may be that I'm mistaken. It is just a well-dressed man who happens to grow a pair of wings and chances upon a lion who happens to rest with one paw facing upward. And, they happen to face opposite directions, hauled and halted by the out-fading lamppost as a counterpoise in between.

Back to the main attraction on the left--Les Valeurs ersonnelles (Personal Values, 1952). An ordinary room with two rugs (one properly placed and one slightly slant), walled by clouds against the blue sky. If size proportion were not a problem, the most bizarre thing in the room would be the window (whose reflection is shown in the mirror)--what's a window doing in the room walled by clouds and patches of blue sky? For more clouds and sky? (Or it's just clouds-in-the-sky wallpaper in the room?)

But here the size proportion is a problem. It is the main problem, really--they are gargantuanly over-sized. A comb on the bed, a matchstick on the rug, a shave brush on top of the mirror closet, a wine glass in the center front, and a bar of soup on the slant rug (Yes, the funny thing that looks like a bell-shaped hood of a jellyfish).  Here, let me profess to quote Magritte like an art professor:

"To the best of my capacity, by painterly means, I describe objects--and the mutual relationship of objects--in such a way that none of our habitual concepts or feelings is necessarily linked with them."

Can it be that "our habitual concepts or feelings" are blurred and dulled by our daily contact with objects? Can it be that we are unknowingly trained to take things for granted and therefore the objects that serve our daily needs are both indispensable and indiscernible, like air, sun, or water? Can it be that the painter's visual hyperbole is an aesthetic rhetoric and a saving grace to restore our senses to the significance of objects? The human space is filled up with inanimate objects; the foregrounded personal belongings now seem to have a room of their own.