Juxtaposition of two contrasting ideas
Antithesis was one of the most disturbing pictorial themes of surrealism. It is exemplified in many
of the paintings by Rene Magritte who achieves shock effects through the juxtaposition of
incongruous objects. Magritte’s paintings are argumentative; they question one’s assumptions
about the world, about the relationship between a painted object and a real object, and they set up
unforeseen analogies or juxtapose completely unrelated things in a deliberately deadpan style.
They do not have a meaning in the sense than the antithesis is resolvable. Surealism was primarily
a literary movement but it is perhaps relevant here to recall its aim as stated by Andre Breton in
1930.
“Everything suggests that there exists a certain point in the mind at which life and death,
the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the
incommunicable, the heights and the depths, cease to be perceived contradictorily. Now
it is in vain that one would seek any other motive for surrealist activity than the hope of
determining this point”.
(033) Rene Magritte 1928 Threatening Weather Roland Penrose Collection
