L’empire des lumières 1949

René Magritte made this uncanny painting of a nocturnal street scene under a bright blue sky. I can just imagine him there in his studio, puzzling out this paradox. He’s got his brushes loaded with smooth, creamy paint, laying down these crisp, clean edges. The sky is rendered in this flat, even tone, punctuated by these puffy, cartoonish clouds. It’s like he’s saying, “Hey, look at this! What do you make of it?” I feel this gentle tension between what we see and what we know. He’s playing with the idea that painting can conjure a space that is both familiar and strange, inviting us to question our perceptions and expectations. Like other surrealists such as Dalí, he gets us thinking about what painting is doing, how it is making us see. The image is suspended between night and day, and exists in a state of in-betweenness.