Coincidentally, Velazquez was also fond of painting eggs. He is the clairvoyant, and painting is the game that criss-crosses time and space. Magritte is painting the future, the potential of life. He isn’t painting what he sees but rather a set of propositions. He happens to be painting a picture of a bird in flight, but is using as his subject a single egg on a table. In another fabulous painting, The Claivoyance, of 1936, Magritte, like Velazquez before him, paints a self-portrait of himself painting a painting. It could well be described as the greatest “one-liner” in art history. It is painting and writing and both are slippery languages. It is a painting of a pipe and a painting of words. Of course the pipe is not a pipe but a representation of a pipe. In one of his most iconic paintings, The Treachery of Images, more famously referred to as “ceci n’est pas une pipe”, Magritte paints a beautifully rendered pipe with writing beneath it that declares it’s own fallacy. He is the comic philosopher/painter par excellence. The Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte also loved asking these same questions. It’s a painting about what it means to look at paintings. So in a very real way, we are the subject of Velazquez’s masterpiece! It’s a journey into the heart of representation and reproduction. How can he be painting them if they are standing on his side of the canvas? The King and Queen, a more likely subject, also appear in the painting, but they are pictured in a small frame or mirror at the back of the room, possibly reflected in another mirror in front of the artist, where we, the viewer, now stand. Supposedly it’s the ladies-in-waiting, 'Las Meninas', but the Infanta and her maids and the now famous dwarfs and dog have their backs to the artist. The subject of the painting is also in question. It’s a dizzying conundrum, a tour de force in the act of reflection and contemplation. We simultaneously see the finished painting, and the process of its making. We are looking at Velazquez looking at us watching him paint the painting that we now see before us. So as viewers we are looking at Velazquez the artist looking back at us. And he’s reproduced a partial view of the back of the canvas that he is currently painting - stretched on a wooden frame and supported by an easel - which is presumably the back of the painting we are now looking at. Velazquez has painted himself in the painting. But look a little deeper, and the painting plays with your mind. What exactly is Velazquez painting and what exactly are we looking at? On the surface, the painting is a snapshot of the royal court, the Infanta and her maids in all their finery. This painting asks lots of questions of the viewer. In the Prado Museum in Madrid hangs one of the greatest works of art ever created, both technically and philosophically the painting Las Meninas by the Spanish painter Diego Velasquez. After all, why spend a thousand hours doing what the camera can do in a split second? And why limit the magic and alchemy of paint to a potentially sterile and futile pursuit? Mostly it just leads to paintings that “look like photographs”. Technical virtuosity and the ability to deceive the eye doesn’t necessarily lead to interesting painting. Two and a half thousand years later, realism remains a highly valued style of painting, and artists are still trying to “fool” their audience.īut realism, or to update the concept, “photo-realism” or “hyperrealism” can be a poisoned chalice. According to legend, the Fifth Century Greek painter Zeuxis painted a still life of grapes so realistic that birds flew down to peck at them. The ancient world provides another parable. Great paintings play games and ask questions and as such they are intrinsically philosophical. He or she can construct narratives, simulate (and stimulate) emotions, mimic the texture of the world and speculate on what it means to look and think and interpret. With a few more strokes the clever painter opens up a whole box of tricks. A single mark on a white surface is immediately an illusion of space, a figure on a ground. It’s axiomatic to say that all painting is an illusion, an imitation of the real world a mimesis. This is certainly true of the best paintings, as it is of fables. The Roman fabulist Phaedrus wrote that “things are not always what they seem”.
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