Shadows in Surrealism

If there is an art period that dedicated special attention to the use of shadows, it is the Surrealism, specially in the representation of dreams. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte brought to the representation of dreams a truth even more explicit than in the reality seen by our human eyes.

To do that, they used a detailed and exhaustive application of shadows.

In Dali’s paintings, the shadows help to recompose contradictory images, in what is known as the “critic-paranoid” method. This can be seen in many of his paintings. I’m not a specialist in Dalí as I’m not a great appreciator of surrealist paintings, however, this representation of dreams, the subconscious, the surreal is very clear and evident, and it is interesting to find out that they are related to many philosophic theories that started appearing at the same time in history.

Although I’m not a big fan of surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy, because they are too strong, there is too much information, too much drawing, too much colour… I appreciate very much Magritte’s paintings.

René Magritte works very much with what he calls The betrayal of images. It is clearly the reflex of the changing of times that occupied the man’s minds in the middle of the 20^th century. He projects to the canvas what the philosophers said in words. He challenges reality by denying what is obvious.

The best example is the painting called The betrayal of images, mostly know as This is not a pipe. The painter paints a beautifull pipe (beautifully executed!), but he denies the evidence that it is a pipe.

He also plays with the conventions, by switching the backgrounds with the foregrounds, like in The telescope. He puts nowadays objects, such as an apple, in awkward places and with absurd sizes!

I like this dichotomy in Magritte’s painting. It is somehow funny, somehow mysterious.