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"Perspicacity" by Rene Magritte

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dream_weaver

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In french, it is called La Clairvoyance. Painted in 1936. Rene Magritte is classified as a surrealist, and many of his other works bear witness to it.

This is one of the few visual artworks that I have found that really appeal to me.

With the egg on the table serving as the apparent object of focus for the painter in the paintings inspiration, while the object on the canvas is an adult bird in flight. He is not painting what is, but as it might be.

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The image invites you to question.  The characters gaze is focused slightly beyond the egg, as though there are things calling his attention outside the frame of the image.  Did the character, or a friend, or a bird place the egg?  A play on the question of which came first...  Which came first the artist or the artwork?  It is close to a self portrait, but not quite.  The element I like most is mans ability to use scientific method to discern the object, the egg, where a predator might recognize it merely as food. 

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Did he use two mirrors and paint what he saw in the mirror? Eastman came up with the camera in 1888, well before the painting. The angle of the head in the photo is different enough to compensate for a set of mirrors that would take the window out of the frame of reference, if this is the setting in which the painting was created.

If a man picked up a brush and painted the very first artwork ever in history, you could say that the artist and the artwork came simultaneously.

 

Edited by dream_weaver
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10 hours ago, Tenderlysharp said:

The element I like most is mans ability to use scientific method to discern the object, the egg, where a predator might recognize it merely as food.

Replacing the bird in flight with a cooked egg on a plate on the table, it would still project a different outcome of what the egg might become. The projection of a potential future of the initial egg, as a bird or breakfast, would still be there.

Magritte does a self portrait, projecting himself as man, the painter or artist. The egg on the table, the easel, the chair the paintbrush and palette are the concretes of reality. The bird in flight is the artwork. A representation of a consciousness that can take flight. A cooked egg on a plate would not capture the same spirit, if that was Magritte's intent.

 

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I see "becoming" 

The idea that things are always becoming, shedding what they were to become what they can be.  This is especially true of life and individuals if they are to grow.

In order to recognize this and participate in this becoming one must recognize this potential, starting from but always looking to just outside of things as they are... toward what they will become.  

Somehow growth and life call on this sight and to direct one to strike out for that becoming.  The end result is the expression and culmination of the potential... the bird.

Accordingly, a fried egg would totally change what I would have seen here!

edit:  can't leave out element of self portrait... perhaps this is a useful way of showing that kind of recognition in action.. or a statement about art being about that kind of recognition or facilitating it for the artist.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
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