Nocturne 1925

This is René Magritte, with his painting ‘Nocturne’. I can imagine him layering thin glazes, in a way that feels both deliberate and kind of dreamy. That red bird, painted flat and kind of awkward, seems to be flying into the room. I wonder what Magritte was thinking about, putting a bird between that white sculpture and the burning house? Painting is always a bit of a conversation with other painters, and this feels like a dreamscape mixed with stagecraft. The heavy curtain on the right reminds me of de Chirico. But the surrealists had a very different sensibility. They embraced the unexpected and the absurd. They were all in conversation, cross-pollinating with each other’s imagery. Painting is an embodied form of expression, and for Magritte, that means embracing the enigmatic. We are left with a sense of wonder and an open-ended invitation to imagine.