Nocturne 1925

René Magritte’s ‘Nocturne’ is a painting that juggles the strange and familiar with a deceptively light touch. There's a stage set here. See how the floorboards crack open like parched earth, and the red curtain pools to the right, heavy and still? Then your eye is drawn to the window, which shows a house ablaze. The paint is applied thinly, almost like a veil, allowing Magritte to build up layers of colour and texture while maintaining a sense of flatness. Take a look at the red bird flying towards the window. It’s so precisely rendered that it could almost be a cutout pasted onto the surface. Magritte invites us to play with perception, just like Giorgio de Chirico, an artist whom Magritte greatly admired. He asks us to embrace the nonsensical and the unresolved, reminding us that art, at its best, is a portal to uncharted territories of the imagination.