Self. Portrait.

self portrait

 

I walk by this building plastered with “variations” of “The Son of Man” every morning on my way to work. I always wonder whether Rene Magritte would weep about his painting being used to advertise restaurants.

Although he does not strike me as someone who is obsessed with the divide between high and low/pop arts.

Margritte painted The Son of Man as a self-portrait. This I knew. However, I never knew what he said about the painting until I wanted to tell the story of how I  took this self-portrait and became curious of the story behind Margritte’s.

At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

 

Son of Man

 

Brilliant.

16 thoughts on “Self. Portrait.

  1. Ameena

    I know almost nothing about art but I do know that I love Magritte. So much so that I fell for a One King’s Lane sale today and purchased a print. I can’t wait for it to arrive!

    Thank you for educating me in the meantime…
    Ameena recently posted…winningMy Profile

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  2. BigLittleWolf

    I’ve always loved Magritte. I like the clarity in his surrealism (oxymoronic though that may sound). His themes of hiding are fascinating – missing faces, hiding in plain sight, our many masks, the elements of his childhood that come into play in his work.

    Aren’t we all more intrigued by what we think is hidden or withheld than by what is (theoretically) right “out there?”And behind what is hidden, there can be more, still.
    BigLittleWolf recently posted…Courting by Text: Is the Non-Date the New Normal?My Profile

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