The Son of the Apple

Magritte, "The Son of Man", a painter of ideas—who does not see, but merely thinks, a parlor communist like Sartre, Picasso, and so many others, who provided cultural legitimacy to a totalitarian ideology.

He was only able to be an ardent communist because he had the luxury of living in a capitalist democracy that allowed him to paint whatever he wanted and think however he pleased.

Magritte possesses craftsmanship, has a clean, academic execution, and masters volume and perspective, but his plastic technique remains purely instrumental. It serves the idea; it does not celebrate itself. Next to Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez, or, to remain within modernism, next to the chromatic force of Matisse or the genius of Van Gogh, Magritte looks almost like a technical illustrator. With the great masters of plasticity, the way light falls on a canvas or the texture of a brushstroke can take your breath away, even if the subject is just a piece of meat hanging in a butcher shop or an apple on a table. In Magritte’s work, the pictorial matter is "tame", flat, almost industrial.

He was not a revolutionary of form or color, but the illustrator of visual games.

Art history placed him among "the best" not for his qualities as a colorist or for the virtuosity of his drawing, but because he opened the door to what would later become "conceptual art"—a movement where the idea behind the work becomes more important than the artwork itself. But outside of art, there is no more art, only the ideas that make people gray, lonely, uniform, disguised, and unhappy.

I realized Magritte's atheism from the title of this illustrative "painting" which, while correctly interposing that sinful "knowledge" between the person (face, prosopon) and the rest of the world, between the person and his own gaze, gives the image the title of The Son of Man—that is, the person/ face par excellence.

I cannot say I ever liked his work, finding him neither particularly pictorial nor deeply enigmatic in his games of ideas and "surrealist" associations; in fact, he seemed downright banal to me, but I ran into his work periodically, and I cannot say it truly bothered me either.

Now, however, I wanted to understand more. So I read a bit about that giant apple in the empty-full room, which pointed me toward what is apparently his most famous "self-portrait"—since all of an artist's creations are their self-portraits. There, I saw the fruit of knowledge labeled as The Son of Man. What a false irony!

An image that describes the limited, anonymous, and dull human being, all the more lonely the more integrated they are into the crowd-mass... yes, the mass-man. Exactly him! Unrefined by the process of individuation, or, in other words, unilluminated by grace. Fallen man—yes, indeed: the man who had the apple fall on his head, but not like Isaac Newton upon his head, but rather right into his head, where instead of "the mind descended into the heart," there remained a Luciferic mind that struts like a rooster on a dung heap.

So... a communist. That is what came to my mind, and I searched... indeed: he withdrew from the party but remained as communist as could be—which means opaque to his own humanity. Because here is what he believed he was painting: "My images hide nothing. They evoke mystery and, indeed, when someone sees one of my paintings, they ask this simple question: 'What does this mean?'. It means nothing, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

Reality is full of a mystery that means nothing.

Well, then why do you need to recompose the elements of the visible world just to perceive its mystery? Is it still the mystery of this world, or is the world so banal that you feel like cutting it to pieces and putting it back together like a collage just to artificially create the illusion of mystery? That is point number one.

And point number two... a mystery that means nothing might sound like a wise phrase from a guru, but without the depth of such a consciousness (one that has been in a trance, that has levitated), it sounds flat, uninteresting—the exact opposite of a state of mystery. Mystery belongs to emotions, curiosity, coincidences, hopes, and fears, to harmonies and exuberance, to silences full of shivers, not... a boulder in mid-air and an oversized glass.

Magritte believed he could paint something about the world completely detached from his own subconscious. That is, he believed he could remove himself from the equation, just as any communist does when trying to change the world by changing others. And his own subconscious was showing him a room filled with ego—the Luciferic apple, the prideful confidence in the reality of his own nonsense, the typical ideologue's disregard for reality.

But he did not want to be interpreted. He wanted to say: "it is a mystery." As if, had it been understood, the mystery would be lost. Mystery is God, and it cannot disappear. Nothing we know can make Him vanish. Scientific discoveries have only moved closer to this understanding. And painting, when it is truly pictorial, is more moving and closer to Him.