Eloge de la dialectique 1948

This painting, Eloge de la dialectique, is one of Magritte's many explorations into what it means to see. You know, the trick in this image is the way the painterly surface gives the whole thing away. Look at the stippled facade of the building, like tiny pats of putty, and then compare it to the smooth, airless dollhouse inside. It’s a study in contrasts. The paint handling is pretty straightforward, and the colors are muted. There is something unsettling about the little house inside the building: a house within a house, which makes you wonder, what other realities are there within realities? What is real and what is not? Magritte loved playing with this kind of visual ambiguity. Like Duchamp, he was always poking fun at our assumptions, and that spirit definitely carries over to later artists like Jeff Koons, who also plays with scale and the surreal juxtaposition of objects.