The art that I love - 13

Superstition is a powerful emotion, or rather a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation. Yes, but it's strongly felt nevertheless. As strong as paranoia or loneliness are felt.

Today on this special day, one that occures only once every four years, I like to present you to a fellow country person of mine and first grade artist to boot. René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, a little town in the French speaking part of Belgium.

His background was very much shaped by his parents. His father was a 'petite bourgeois' textile merchant, and his mother committed suicide when Margritte was still a teenager. After having taken everything into account one can describe him as having been the ideal candidate for a surrealist artist.

Historically, it's an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War One in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Well, that's what the consensus is.

It's also about powerful emotions or rather thoughts that one isn't fully aware of. Those that influence actions and feelings greatly. The work is then that what defies logical interpretation. But at its core, surrealism is characterized by three main themes: dreams, the unconscious, and the irrational.

In The lovers, the first in a series of four variations that Magritte painted in 1928, he invokes the cinematic cliché of a close–up kiss but subverts our voyeuristic pleasure by shrouding the faces in cloth. I guess that I do think that it's a representation of love at its purest possible indeed.

The consensus is that true love only occurs when the individuals in love are no longer two entities, but are one. In this painting we see two people, each with a cloth wrapped around their head. The head. The source of self. One is in love and locked into each other, even further than any bodily love could be