Into At Upon

Rene Magritte-The False Mirror 1929

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Sometimes it is difficult to look into you
For your eyes are a mirror reflecting
Staring through the facade of facile charm
Seeing into my ragged threadbare soul
Held together with staples and sellotape
An echoing chamber of other’s voices
You already know that I’m ancient and weary
And I fear your lofty disdain and contempt

Sometimes it is difficult to look at you
For I know that you possess qualities
That blaze with the intensity of a young star
Nurturing vast seething potentialities
Spreading a soft burnished golden light
Over the warming oceans of its satellite
Illuminating the deepest ravine and valley
Far too fierce to be gazed upon directly

Sometimes it is difficult to look upon you
For this is samsara and we are flowing
Downstream towards the roaring rapids
By chance we floated past each other
And I felt a fleeting sensation of affinity
But soon the current will change course
And with each ebbtide we will drift apart
Taking different tributaries to the destination

Empire of Light

Rene Magritte-L’empire des lumières

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Incising memory

Of exorcised desire

Upon the crest

Surveying an Empire of Light

Superimposed upon the mazy suburban grid

Etched in bold relief against the satin backdrop

Myriad glowing grains

Reflections of the larger part of a broken China plate

I was told without a shadow

That this was the way back

The path home

But everything here is unfamiliar and strange

I must have misheard or been misled

I have to return to the starting point

Follow the road to within

The only sure course to reach the wider realm without

Vertumnus

Vertumnus-Guiseppe Arcimboldo circa 1590-1591

Guiseppe Arcimboldo is a hazy peripheral figure in art history. Enjoying noble and royal patronage he was honoured during his lifetime before completely falling out of fashion during the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries only to be rediscovered by the Surrealists in the 20th. Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Man Ray were all admirers and Arcimboldo’s visual puns and double meanings undoubtedly influenced Dali’s infamous paranoiac-critical method. Other art historians posited Arcimboldo as the most mannered of all the Mannerists. His composite portraits certainly show the period’s taste for enigmas and riddles taken far into the hinterlands of the grotesque and the whimsically bizarre.

Vertumnus is Arcimboldo’s most famous painting, a composite portrait of his patron, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia Rudolf II as Vertumnus, the Roman God of metamorphosis, the seasons, gardens and vegetable growth. The plants, flowers and fruits that form the portrait of Rudolf II are from every season and are taken to represent the perfect harmony and balance with nature that his reign would re-establish. Unfortunately events and history had other things in mind for the studious, occult inclined Rudolf II and his notably tolerant court of Prague, leading eventually to the calamity of the Thirty Year War between competing Catholic and Protestant states before engulfing the majority of European great powers.

Other notable composite portraits painted by Arcimboldo include the Four Seasons, the Four Elements and the witty The Librarian (below).

The Librarian- Guiseppe Arcimboldo 1566

The Treachery of Images

The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)-Rene Magritte 1928-1929

A supremely thought provoking and troubling  philosophical painting by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte. We are presented with a meretriciously drawn image of a pipe while beneath the neat legend paradoxically informs us that Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). It seems that before us is less a painting than another one of Magritte’s  monstrously banal, and ultimately terrifying, pictorial mysteries.

The pipe drawn with such painstaking exactitude is of course just a representation of a pipe. You cannot hold in your hands, stuff it with tobacco and smoke it, which is surely what is required of a pipe for it to be a pipe. Yet we feel perplexed and somehow obscurely cheated. If it the case that ‘perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves’, then all we can know are images of the world, and images are by their very nature treacherous. All we have is the map, and as everyone knows, the map is not the territory.

The Art of The Atrocity Exhibition

Cover of First UK Edition of The Atrocity Exhibition-J.G Ballard 1970-Based on Salvador Dali’s City of Drawers

J.G Ballard, the genre busting English science fiction writer responsible for such novels as The Drowned World, Crash, High Rise and Empire of the Sun as well as some of the finest short stories in world literature, frequently remarked that he really wanted to be a painter in the surrealist tradition that he so loved instead of a writer.

This deep reverence and constant engagement with the visual arts can be most clearly seen in his demented and wildly perverse cult classic collage novel The Atrocity Exhibition. Referencing Ernst, Dali, Magritte, Dominguez, Matta, Bellmer, Delvaux, Tanguy as well as Pop Artists Tom Wesselman and Andy Warhol in the frequent free association tests and ‘condensed novels’ that comprise the text, The Atrocity Exhibition could easily be used as a textbook primer on surrealism and popular culture in the sixties.

In 1990 RE/Search Publications issued an expanded edition with four new stories, Ballard’s bizarre yet illuminating annotations, disturbing illustrations by the medical illustrator/graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner and photographs by Ana Barrado of brutalist buildings and weapon ranges. It also features a preface by the Hitman for the Apocalypse himself, William S. Burroughs.

Below are some of the many paintings mentioned in the text, some of which are very well known and others less so.

Garden Airplane Trap-Max Ernst 1935

The Annunciation-Rene Magritte 1930

The Disasters of Mysticism-Roberto Matta 1942

Hypercubic Christ-Salvador Dali 1954

The Persistence of Memory-Salvador Dali 1931

Dawn over the City-Paul Delvaux-1940

Decalcomania-Oscar Dominguez 1936

Hans Bellmer

Indefinite Divisibility-Yves Tanguy 1942

The Great American Nude 99-Tom Wesselman 1968

Marilyn Diptych-Andy Warhol 1962