﻿If you’ve been following this channel, you know I love René Magritte. I love to talk about his
paintings, not only because they’re sometimes strange and bizarre, but because they’re more
often than not pretty thought-provoking. His Treachery of Images is one of the most
significant and renowned examples of that. Ceci n’est pas une pipe, this is not a pipe. I’ve
mentioned it in another Magritte video and I’ll get to making a video about it one day, I promise.
The challenge behind this painting is that images are only representations.
This is not a pipe, it’s an image of a pipe. This is not Napoléon, this is an image of Napoléon.
This is not the Eiffel Tower, it’s an image of the Eiffel Tower. What makes images treacherous
to Magritte is the fact that they disguise themselves as an object without really being one.
You can see how Magritte’s paintings, despite their lack of stylization,
can nonetheless be engaging.
The Son of Man, another of Magritte’s famous paintings, is no exception.
Like many other works of his, it’s an incredibly simple image, in this case, a man wearing formal
clothes, a bowler hat, standing stiffly in front of an equally simple background. Nothing would
be more bland than this picture if it wasn’t for one thing. The green apple hiding the man’s face.
"At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple,
hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly.
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.
This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict,
one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."
I absolutely love the idea of the tension between the visible that is hidden and the visible that
is present because it creates a new state of being in a painting, let me explain. Some things
can be visible, they’re there. Take Nighthawks for example. The visible is what we can see,
the diner, the empty street, the customers, the clerk... However, some things can be invisible,
but we don’t really care about them. Imagine there’s an apple somehow behind
this man. If it’s invisible in a painting, if we don’t have information about this invisible thing,
then it might as well not exist. We don’t really care.
However, through the Son of Man, Magritte turns this binary into a spectrum with,
at the middle, the visible that is hidden. Something that isn’t invisible,
for we need it to be visible to care about it, but not completely visible either. It’s somewhere in
between and this in-between state is what creates a tension or, in Magritte’s words, a conflict.
If we could see this man’s face, this painting would have probably
fallen into irrelevance and be forever forgotten. But that’s not the case.
It’s widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s most famous paintings, but why?
The painting positions itself at the intersection between the visible and the invisible, a sort of
imbalance which makes this painting stand-out. But I’m willing to say
that the reason for this painting’s success isn’t its imbalance, but its seductiveness.
To explore the seductiveness of the Son of Man, I want to briefly touch on its religious
interpretation, mainly the significance of the apple. Magritte would cover the faces of
his subjects in other paintings, either with cloth, birds or flowers, but the apple is,
at least to me, the most evocative. The apple can symbolize, to Christians, two things:
Knowledge and Temptation. It’s known as the fruit of knowledge while, in the Son of Man,
it hides information. It doesn’t bring knowledge, but conceals it. The apple also
symbolizes temptation and what is the apple in the Son of Man if not temptation.
Like we established earlier, if the apple wasn’t present, we wouldn’t care about the painting
and we wouldn’t care about the man’s face, but, with the apple, we do. Our curiosity is aroused,
we know what’s behind the apple, we know it’s boring, we know we don’t really care, yet we do.
The reason why we do is because Magritte is seducing us.
By not revealing everything, Magritte is creating a mystery, he’s leaving us, in a way,
unsatisfied. This painting is unsatisfying, but not unsatisfying enough for us to
ignore it. It’s threading the line between revealing too much and not revealing enough.
Unlike many other paintings, Magritte is making his painting be desired,
he shows us that there’s more to this painting, but doesn’t reveal it. He leaves us
wanting more and what is seduction if not that, leaving us wanting more.