La Chambre de Madame Sundheim 1962

René Magritte painted "La Chambre de Madame Sundheim" with oil on canvas, and what strikes me is the way he builds a world with such flat, declarative marks. It's a painting about a painting – a theatrical space where the real and the artificial blend into a dream-like state. The colors are muted, like they've been borrowed from a faded photograph, yet there's an eerie glow emanating from within. Look at the way the pale pink light spills out from those window voids. The paint itself seems almost scrubbed onto the canvas, giving it a matte, slightly roughened surface. In the lower-left corner, there's an odd join between the floorboards and the wall. It makes the whole room teeter on the brink of collapse. Magritte's work always reminds me of de Chirico, another master of unsettling juxtapositions, but Magritte has a lighter, more playful touch. Both ask us to question what we see and embrace the delightful ambiguity of art.