But in seeing the exhibition and reading about the man, I’ve had a shift in my thinking about him in that his work plunges deeper into the mystery than I realized. I was, of course, drawn to him for semiotic reasons: he’s a field day for someone who enjoys the challenge of making meaning out of the meaningless.
But reading his giant words quoted on a wall of the Art Institute is when I realized that much of the time he is not concerned with meaning. He doesn’t necessarily want his audience to connect the dots. Often, there are no dots--there's just the mystery. It really is just a train sticking out of a fireplace. In his book Magritte, Jacques Meuris asserts that, in many ways Magritte wasn’t a surrealist, he was a realist in that he took the surrealistic images that his mind created and tried to reproduce them on canvas as accurately as possible. He disdained Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland because it presented fantastic scenes in a dreamscape. Magritte's point is that the dreamscape is a very real part of our reality, albeit one that exists in our minds, though this reinforces the thesis that what happens in the mind, as mysterious and unexplainable as it is, is in many ways just as real as the tangible world around us--a powerful idea that not only challenges the way we think about our minds, but how we look at the perspective lenses with which we view the objective world around us.
For many of his works, there was no point other than the experience of the mystery itself. So let’s tour some mysteries…




