The fire 1943

René Magritte made this painting with oil on canvas, and look at that palette of red, orange and blue! It’s as if the painting came into being, shifting, emerging and solidifying through intuition. I can imagine Magritte standing in front of the canvas and thinking about the sensation of colour. How he might have felt as he applied each layer, watching the trees emerge. There’s a real physicality to the surface, isn’t there? A kind of back and forth between control and chance. I love the way he’s used the texture of the paint to describe the trees. Those repeated vertical marks communicate a feeling, an intention, and a kind of material understanding of the world. Magritte wasn’t afraid of breaking the rules, and he definitely knew how to have fun with paint. I wonder what the surrealists made of this painting and what Magritte made of them. Anyway, artists are in ongoing conversation across time, inspiring each other’s creativity. Painting is an expression which embraces ambiguity and multiple interpretations.