Aux Pleines Nuages

VanGerven|VanRijnberk photographed Au Plaines Nuages in Ieper, Belgium. The images, depict porcelain teinted nude male and female mannequins with their heads in the clouds. VanGerven|VanRijnberk obviously make reference to the iconography of the surrealist Belgian painter René Magritte and his well known painting of his wife Georgette Berger “Black Magic” 1945

In many of René Magritte (1898-1967) paintings one sees a surreal pattern of blue skies and white clouds. This poetic addition lifts the object in the paintings from the mundane by passing an irrational, mysterious and metaphysical cross-referencing to the subject. A reference to dreams, heaven or the hereafter. Magritte’s personal approach to Surrealism leaves us contemplating the irrational in a subconscious maze of meaning between the juxtaposition of the images he created and ideas that he uses in his art. His art always raises more questions than it can answer. René Magritte: the aim of the artist is to place reality in a different context.

“Black Magic” is one of Rene Magritte’s best nude paintings. He painted several other versions including some with a different titles (“The Magnet” and also “The Dream”). His painting of the lovely Georgette features, her upper torso blending with the color of the sky. Georgette, first his model and his muse later became his wife, is painted in a classical manner. Her figure abiding by the laws of beauty and proportion and resembling a marble sculpture as much as a live model. This traditional representation, however, is juxtaposed with the unexpected coloration of the figure, whose upper body gradually acquires the tone of the sky behind her.

The nude in Rene Magritte’s works are depicted either with their eyes closed, or with their heads turned away from the viewer or,  as in the “Black Magic”, with blank eyes resembling those of a sculpture. In doing this she transforms into the object of the spectator’s gaze and erotic desires. 

In Rene Magritte said that an undercurrent of eroticism was one of the reasons for the a painting to exist. “Black Magic” asserted itself therefore most intensely and explicitly as a stately classical nude with her cool coloring. For the very reason that this portrait of Georgette aims a maximum resemblance and that on other hand the painting’s academic classic setting resembles a sculpture plus that  Rene Margritte paints the upper torso as a blue sky that blend in with the background of a blue sky, the viewers mind becomes scrambled. The add ons as layered references aim to defer the mystery and therefore emanating from identifying the painting as a portrait of Georgette.

VanGerven|VanRijnberk’s perceive in this work “Aux Pleines Nuages” that the photographs they took snug themselves up nicely near the multi layered pantheon of René Magritte imaginative world. Undressed mannequins, the world mirroring upon them and the white clouds in the blue sky reflecting on them. Yes, the spirit of Rene Magritte still was around there in Belgium at that time when VanGerven|VanRijnberk saw this near empty but yet fully stocked shop window.