This is how the painter describes the painting:
1. In front of a window as seen from the interior of the room, there is a painting which represents precisely the portion of landscape concealed by the painting.
2. For instance the tree represented in the painting displaces the tree behind the painting outside the room.
3. For the viewer the tree is simultaneously inside the room in the painting and outside the room in the real landscape.
4. This is how we see the world, we see it outside ourselves; and yet the only representation of it is within us.
5. Similarly we sometimes remember a past event and the memory makes it a present event. Time and space lose that crude meaning which is the only one we have in our daily experience. [1]
But does the painting really exist?
6. Perhaps the canvas of the painting could be seen as a transparent piece of glass, creating an identical image of the landscape in the glass.
7. But the curtain on the left side of the painting is hidden behind the canvas, suggesting that the canvas is not just transparent.
8. Even if the canvas were made of glass, the painter would still have to paint the portion of the landscape found behind the canvas.
9. He would have to indulge in a faithful reproduction of reality, although distorted by the various surrealistic elements.
10. This is also the way we perceive reality: As a faithful and crude representation of the outside world, tinted by the elements of our personal wishes and desires.
But if the painting is real, is reality real?
This is related to the human condition:
11. The human condition is the key elements which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and mortality. [2]
12. More fundamentally, we can say that the world is as it is- It is impossible to perceive the world in a way different from what we perceive.
13. In other words, the objects which compose our everyday reality take shape according to our own senses, and according to our own emotional and mental state.
14. This way we build up a grounded and comfortable reality, composed of all the objects which we consider useful and familiar.
But again…
15. Had the objects have some shape or function beforehand? Before even we realized that they existed?
16. Had space and time existed before we invented rods and clocks, and the necessity of keeping the time and measuring the distance?
17. Or is it that all the things which constitute reality come about at the same time with our own consciousness and desire, emerging from a previously undifferentiated and infinite landscape?
18. That our own existence is being imprinted on the surface of a canvas, depicting simultaneously and interchangeably both nature and the human condition?
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_condition]
2/2/2008
Painting: The human condition, Rene Magritte
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