The Art of Simulation

René Magritte

Being away for quite a long time, due to professional reasons, gave me a nostalgic feeling of wanting so much to come back to this magic place and restart exactly where I’ve stopped. Here I found a place where creativity it’s possible without feeling strained by prejudice or society canons. Freedom allows me to push forward my imagination assuming different characters, dressing or undressing a variety of clothes, using as many masks as I please giving me the sense of performing a role as if I was an actor on my own play. And then, wings come attached with that freedom and flying was never so easy. The sense of being an actor on my own play doesn’t make me feel like those Beckett characters where nothing happens in spite of all efforts. Being here gives me the opportunity to explore a wide variety of subjects which I’m interested on and where nowhere else I ‘d have the proper incentive to look upon so throughly. And this is also valid for those Arnold Geulincx quotes, which Beckett rephrased on “Murphy”, saying that “where you are worth nothing, there you will wish for nothing”. Actually where I am now worth the world to me, for a huge number of reasons but mainly because here I can be absolutely free, one day being a characters in one of those roles created by Beckett, being Estragon, Kafka cockroach, get inside a Buñuel social caos, being the Virgin Mary, a cat or Wonder Woman. Being here means you can be whatever you want to be. And that means light up your day with an absolutely bright light, making you feel as free as a bird with huge wings and no barriers to express what you feel like in a variety of ways.

The "allegory of simulation" was expressed by several painters and I found quite a few works of art which highlighted the topic. Surrealism played a major role being Magritte one of the painters which made several approaches to the theme suggesting that every time we leave our house we tend to choose a different mask according to our mood. Is this true to everyone? 

Lourenzo Pitti "The Allegory of Simulation"

Looking further back in time, other painters also expressed the art of social theatre behind masks. Lorenzo Lippi (1606-65) was one of those giving us in his painting "The Allegory of Simulation" the ability to speculate about faces, gestures, lack of a smile, sharp looks, masks and fruits placed in a certain manner  wondering what they represent. Is the girl going to put the mask on or is she just taking it out? Her impassive expression surely doesn’t give us an idea of what she is thinking. Although we may speculate we can't  foreseen  on her expression what in the world is she really thinking. Is she part of a play? Is she offering a fruit or is just about to eat it herself?

This kind of contradictory questions do not help us to understand the subtitles of the mystery. Actually they only serve to emphasise our inability to see what's behind a motionless and inexpressive face. Strangelly, if we look at the mask somehow it looks to have life, colour, and a talking expression which makes us wonder if the mask isn’t the only opportunity that the girl has, maybe acting through some theatre character, to experience drama, love, fear, laughter, dead or desire. Subjective impressions most of the times led to nowhere. Impressions tend to be speculative and dishonest conclusions may arise pretending we understand something which actually we do not.

Emotions are well vivid in a play and surely actors may stand out in their performances if they are good enough on convincing the public. CRV©

René Magritte - The Human Condition

 

                                                         The Human Condition - 1933

                                                  National Gallery of Art - Washington

"In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape."

René Magritte in 1933

René Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, Belgium. After studying at the Acabemy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he worked in a wallpaper factory and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926. Magritte settled in Paris, at the end of of 1920's, where he met members of the Surrealist Movement and soon became envolved with the most significant artists of the group sharing their principles and their unique way of facing art. He turned to Brussels a few years later and opened an advertising agency. Magritte's fame was secured in 1936, after his first exhibition in New York. Since then, New York has been the location of two of the most important retrospective shows - at MoMA in 1965 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.

"La Condition Humaine", in english, The Human Condition, is one of the many versions Magritte painted on the same theme. The picture is emblematic of the work he produced in Paris during the 1930's, when he was still under the spell of the Surrealists. Generally the name of the painting is valid to refer to two similar oil in canvas Magritte painted. One was completed in 1933 and is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the other was completed in 1935 and is part of the Simon Spiere Collection in Geneva, Switzerland. A number of drawings of the same name exist as well, including one, at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Here, Magritte executes a kind of optical illusion. He depicts an actual painting on a landscape displayed in front of an open window and he makes the image on the painted picture match perfectly with the "true" landscape outdoors. In doing so, Magritte proposed, in one unique image, the association between nature and its representation through the means of art. This work also stands as an assertion of the artist's power to reproduce nature at will and proves how anbiguous and impalpable the border between exterior and interior, objectivity and subjectivity, and reality and imagination can be.

Source: Wikipedia, Steven Polimood, net