Project for a mural, Norine House, Brussels 1931

This is René Magritte’s gouache on paper, Project for a mural, Norine House, Brussels. It has a blocky, graphic feel. I can imagine Magritte making this work, trying to work out how to fill a much bigger wall with flat shapes and colors, figuring out how to use them to create a three-dimensional world. He must have been thinking, how can I make this interesting? How can I play with perception and space? I see the brushstrokes of the blue sky and the shapes that form the clouds, the flat pink horizon line, and the shadows that give depth to the figures. There's a dialogue here between flatness and depth, the surreal and the ordinary. You can see Magritte's surrealist sensibility coming through, his fascination with the uncanny and the mysterious. His work always feels like an invitation to question what we think we know, and that's a conversation worth having.