ABSTRACT
The deliberateness of the composition adds to the sense of mystery. The mystery evoked in Representation is that of sexual desire, objectified in the female body—that is, made into an object without giving away all its secrets. Rene Magritte used trompe l’oeil to add another layer of depth, related to reflexivity, to show the virtual within the actual, to make something that was possible but not yet visible appear as full and present in the image. Magritte’s goal with painting was to bring viewers into contact with things in such a way that their awareness is changed. Magritte was working with metapictorial devices such as frames, curtains, and windows, as well as transparency, opacity, and scale, finding new ways to explore the nature of painting as a mode of representation and pictorial fiction. For Magritte, painting’s involvement with seeing inextricably links it to thought: To think of an image means Seeing an image.
