The difficult crossing 1926

René Magritte painted The Difficult Crossing at some point, we don't know exactly when, and in it he creates a world where things just aren't quite making sense. Look at the surface, so smooth and flat, almost like a stage set. Everything feels deliberate, calculated, from the hand on the table, holding a bird, to the stormy sea in the background. It's all so precisely rendered, yet so bizarrely juxtaposed. The colours are muted, dreamlike; browns, creams, greys, which gives everything a kind of unreal quality. But it’s that column, the one with the eye, that really gets me. It’s like Magritte is saying, 'Here’s a new way of seeing, one that's maybe a little unsettling. It reminds me a bit of de Chirico, that same sense of uncanny stillness. Ultimately, with Magritte, it's all about questioning our assumptions about reality. There's no definitive answer, no easy explanation, it’s up to you to make sense of it, or not.