O Olhar Interior (Le Regard Intérieur) - René Magritte

O Olhar Interior (Le Regard Intérieur) - René Magritte
Coleção privada
OST - 59x72 - 1942

Depicting a larger-than-life leaf that appears to be growing in front of a stone wall opening onto a landscape, Le regard intérieur combines some of Magritte’s usual motifs in such a way as to create several contradictions: it juxtaposes the plant and animal world in one image, and presents a scene that is at the same time an internal and external setting. The motif of a leaf bejewelled by colourful birds recurred relatively rarely in Magritte’s œuvre. It first appeared in the present work and the closely related La troisième dimension, probably executed around the same time. Now in the collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, it is a composition less complex than the present work, depicting the leaf against a seascape dominated by a large cloudy sky. Another version of this image can be found in Le rendez-vous of 1948, with a turbulent maritime scene in the background. Several years later the artist incorporated it into his celebrated decorative scheme at the Casino Communal de Knokke in Belgium and in several studies for it.

The iconography of a large leaf has its origin in Magritte’s hybrid tree-leaf which first appeared in the 1935 oil titled La géante, and this image would recur in his painting over the next several decades in different contexts. In a letter to André Breton of July 1934, in which he wrote about paintings he was developing as ‘solutions’ to various ‘problems’, Magritte commented about the problem of the tree: ‘I am trying at the moment to discover what it is in a tree that belongs to it specifically but which would run counter to our concept of a tree’ (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.) & S. Whitfield, op. cit., p. 194). He soon found the answer to this question in the image of the tree-leaf: ‘the tree, as the subject of a problem, became a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground’. Although in Le regard intérieur the leaf has not metamorphosed into a tree, the birds that appear to be perching on its carefully delineated veins recall the image of tree branches. Developing the idea of the tree, around the same time as he painted the present work Magritte created another hybrid image – that of a leaf metamorphosing into a bird, which became the subject of several works titled L’Ile au trésor.

Jacques Meuris wrote about the leaf image in Magritte’s painting: ‘Nature, as Magritte saw it, was an element with the same characteristics, mutatis mutandis, as those with which he invested every object, every thing. There was no “naturalist” tendency in his work, no ecological impulse, not even a poetic transformation of the natural. Nevertheless, these leaves, alone or in groups, clad or bare, occasionally nibbled by insects, may be regarded as “individuals”, invested with multifarious feelings, endowed with charms in the various senses of the word’ (J. Meuris, René Magritte, London, 1988, p. 154). Indeed in a number of compositions, the image of a man, woman, an over-sized boulder or apple would replace the leaf in front of the stone wall, as the artist experimented with the various ‘characters’ featuring in his mysterious compositions.

In the present work, a sense of mystery and ambiguity is created by placing the oversized leaf against a quiet, unidentifiable landscape with a river disappearing into the background, reminiscent of landscapes often used by the Old Masters as backdrops to portraits. By changing the context in which we are used to seeing these images, the artist challenges our ideas of the visible world and of the nature of art itself. The stone ledge or wall along the bottom of the composition and the crimson curtain on the left act as repoussoirs, reversing the interior and exterior of the work while challenging the viewer’s perception of the real and the represented, of the hidden and the revealed. The glass of water resting on the wall further enhances the dichotomy between the natural and the man-made.

Notwithstanding the subversive nature of Magritte’s perplexing, surrealist composition, the image of the birds scattered around the leaf, their plumage painted in bright red, yellow and brown tones, is also one of great beauty. Writing about Le rendez-vous, the sister-painting of the present work depicting the leaf against a stormy sea, the Surrealist poet and friend of Magritte’s Louis Scutenaire commented: ‘To make sure of killing them during the hunt, man would shoot showers of arrows into the animals he painted on the walls of caves. Today, he restores life to the leaf by showering it with birds’ (L. Scutenaire in Garde-Fou, 1950, quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 420).