I recently attended This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of René Magritte at Gagosian in London. The exhibition brings together Magritte’s paintings, works on paper and sculpture with works by more than forty contemporary artists who have inherited something from his strange and unmistakable visual language.
Of all the works in the exhibition, I found myself returning to several very different paintings.
The first was The Commonplace (Le Lieu commun) from 1964. A bowler-hatted man appears between two walls, his face visible on one side while another version of him seems to disappear behind the other. Between them is a forest. It is impossible to decide whether we are looking at two men or one man seen from two different points of view. The longer I looked, the less certain the space became. Magritte creates a scene that initially appears perfectly comprehensible, only for its logic to slowly unravel.
I was equally drawn to The Curse (La Malédiction) from 1931, which is almost the opposite in its simplicity: nothing but a blue sky scattered with white clouds. There is no figure, no object, no obvious mystery, and yet it feels strangely mysterious. Magritte takes something as ordinary as the sky above us and turns it into a subject in itself. Looking at it, I was reminded that his Surrealism does not always need an impossible object or a visual joke. Sometimes simply isolating something familiar is enough to make us see it differently.
This quiet transformation of the familiar appears again in The Ready-Made Bouquet (Le Bouquet tout fait) from 1957. There is something tender about the image of a woman with flowers, yet Magritte makes this familiar romantic subject feel slightly uncanny. The title itself is so matter-of-fact, a “ready-made bouquet”, as though something as delicate and natural as flowers could simply be assembled and presented to us. Here, Magritte removes the expected meaning from familiar things without removing their familiarity.
Another painting I kept returning to was The Philosopher’s Lamp (La Lampe philosophique) from 1936, one of Magritte’s surrealist self-portraits. The artist presents himself seated at a table, but with an impossible flame curling towards his nose and a pipe extending from his face. It is absurd and comical, yet the title gives the image another dimension: a lamp suggests illumination, while the philosopher suggests thought and reason. Magritte turns both ideas into a visual joke. There is always something serious beneath the absurd, but also something playful beneath the philosophy.
The Red Model (Le Modèle rouge) from 1937 is considerably more unsettling. At first, it appears to show a pair of shoes standing on the earth. But the longer you look, the more disturbing the image becomes: the shoes gradually turn into human feet, the leather and flesh merging until it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Something completely familiar has been made impossible. The painting plays with the boundary between object and body, making something as ordinary as a pair of shoes suddenly feel strangely alien.
Another work I kept returning to was Les Orgues de la Soirée (Organ-Tones of Evening) from 1965. At first it looks like a quiet landscape, but the rocky forms in the foreground have been transformed into something resembling the pipes of an organ. Even the title seems to ask us to hear the painting rather than simply look at it. Here, one familiar thing quietly becomes another. A rock becomes an instrument; a landscape becomes music; silence seems to acquire a sound.
And then there was The Art of Living (L’Art de vivre) from 1967, painted towards the end of Magritte’s life. A formally dressed man stands before a mountainous landscape, but instead of an ordinary head he has an enormous pink, almost balloon-like form, with a tiny human face inside it. Magritte presents a strangely comic image of what human existence looks like when viewed from the outside: we dress ourselves, behave according to conventions, construct respectable identities, but underneath all that there remains something mysterious and fundamentally unknowable.
Magritte’s Surrealism is often associated with the shock of the impossible: the apple covering a face, a pipe that is not a pipe, a house beneath a daytime sky. But there is something quieter and more compelling in his work. Again and again, Magritte takes something we think we know like a face, a shoe, a bouquet, a landscape, a cloud, a man in a bowler hat, and shifts it just slightly out of place.
Perhaps that is what I found most compelling about the exhibition. The paintings do not simply ask us to accept the impossible. They make us question the ordinary. Magritte asks us to pause before what we think we already understand, and to look again.
