CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/18/2018

René Magritte: The Fifth Season comes to SFMOMA

René Magritte: The Fifth Season, focused on the artist's late vache and "sunlit surrealist" paintings, opens tomorrow at SFMOMA, and we are delighted to have co-published the superb exhibition catalog. "To paraphrase philosopher Ferdinand Alquié," curator Caitlin Haskell writes, "Magritte's Surrealism was not so much about losing reason, but rather a concerted recovery of what reason makes us lose. He took advantage of moments when our subconscious inclination to trust in pictorial transparency would leave us susceptible to loss and cast a spotlight on the hidden realities that exist alongside those we are aware of. A viewer's propensity to believe in the congruence of a canvas and what lies behind it allowed Magritte to operate a mode of two-channel communication: a painterly version of what contemporary artist Julia Scher, who is known for work on themes of surveillance, would call a 'fake feed'… It was Magritte's gift, and his great pleasure, to identify the cracks between a painting's imagery and a viewer's assumptions and then slip a second 'feed' into that perceptual blind spot." Featured image is "Where Euclid Walked" (1955).