The sage's carnival 1947

This is René Magritte’s ‘The Sage's Carnival', painted, we think, sometime in the late 1920s, using oil on canvas. It's a painting that feels really grounded in the process of art-making. You get the sense that he's figuring it out as he goes along, and I always appreciate that. The texture! It feels like Magritte is building up layers and layers of paint. Look how he models the body of the figure, with all those tiny strokes – is that pointillism? The surface is really alive, with all these little touches, which makes the dreamlike quality of the image feel even more real, if that makes sense. I keep coming back to the baguette, of all things. The way he's rendered it, standing up like that, feels so absurd, and yet totally right. Magritte’s got this strange knack for juxtaposing things you just don’t expect, like de Chirico, but there’s something so deadpan about the way he presents it all that I find really compelling. It makes you wonder what he was thinking, or maybe what he wasn't thinking.