Paysage 1920

René Magritte made this painting, Paysage, in 1920 using oil on canvas. What strikes me is Magritte’s almost scientific approach to colour, methodically breaking down the landscape into a series of geometric shapes. It’s like he's dissecting the scene, revealing its underlying structure. The canvas surface looks scrubbed in places; in others, like the blues and greens, the paint is applied more thickly, almost like frosting. There's an area right in the middle where this brown vertical line meets the ground, the way he's blended those colors, it’s like a metaphor for the hidden connections in nature and art. It makes me think of another artist, Hilma af Klint, who was working around the same time. Both were pushing beyond representation towards something more abstract, driven by a similar need to explore hidden realms through form and color. It’s all about embracing ambiguity, where one form morphs into another and meanings keep shifting.