Untitled 1954

René Magritte painted this untitled oil on canvas in 1934, and it's a masterclass in making the ordinary feel totally bizarre. The scene’s set on a city street, bathed in a kind of muted, dreamlike light. Magritte's brushwork is so smooth, so seamless, it almost disappears. The color palette, mostly muted pinks, grays and blues adds to the uncanny effect of the image. But what really gets you is the content, the way one woman is nude and the other is in a pink dress, with a belt, like a proper lady. It's that contrast, that unexpected juxtaposition, that gives the piece its power. Magritte is playing with the line between the familiar and the strange, inviting us to question what we think we know about the world. It's as if he's saying, "Look closer, things are not always as they seem." Like Giorgio de Chirico, Magritte defamiliarises the everyday. Art’s like that, an ongoing conversation where nothing is quite as it seems.