Executed in 1958, René Magritte’s L'État de veille belongs to a limited suite of compositions depicting a dreamlike amalgam of atmosphere and edifice, and features some of the artist’s most iconic motifs. In the present work, the traditional boundaries between landscape and architecture are blurred. The gouache depicts the bright blue sky, dotted with cottony clouds so characteristic of the painter. The clouded sky permeates the scene, surrounding the windows and taking the place of a traditional façade.

With his L'État de veille compositions, each a variation on the related theme, Magritte subverts an ordinary view, that of a building against a sky, creating an uncanny realm where nature and architecture intertwine indistinguishably. In this convergence between dream and reality, the visible contours of objects fade away; brick melts into sky, sky into brick, creating a surreal firmament out of the mundane world. This strange fusion between the natural element of the sky and the artificial element of the building conveys an impression of vertigo, of suspension in a world where the laws of reality fall away. The clarity and precision of Magritte’s rendering reinforce the unreality of the scene, giving the viewer the sensation of witnessing a waking dream where the limits of space and time no longer apply.

The present composition is one of four gouaches by the same title which Magritte sent to his friend, Surrealist poet Jacques Wergifosse, shortly after their execution. Wergifosse, who initially inspired the works’ creation, would only retain one of the compositions, returning the remaining three to the artist. According to David Sylvester’s catalogue raisonné on the artist, the impetus was a vision Wergifosse had en route to his friend:

The theme of the house, with the emphatic frontality of its façade, carries through Magritte’s oeuvre. The artist explored the potentiality of this image primarily from the 1930s onward, recontextualizing and subverting the object of the building in myriad manners: a house as train track, a house reduced to a door, a house at once in darkness and daylight. Within this context, L'État de veille may also be seen as an inversion of the artist’s famed Les Valeurs personnelles from 1952, which depicts a home’s interior, its walls all but supplanted by the clouded blue sky.

Magritte would utilize the pictorial device of thresholds—various windows, doors, stages—throughout his oeuvre, reprising the motif of the windowed façade time and again, including his 1953 Golconde, which stands among the most notable iterations of themes related to L'État de veille.

As with all Magritte’s recurrent motifs, the sky signals something specific in his work. As he once told a reporter, “the sky is a form of curtain because it hides something from us. We are surrounded by curtains” (René Magritte quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, Magritte,1992, note no. 120, n.p.). Absent the curtains which otherwise proliferate within his oeuvre, Magritte’s L'État de veille works employ the sky to conceal the objects around it. Although the sight of a blue expanse with drifting white clouds may seem benign, it alerts us to the ways in which we are unable to see or comprehend ultimate truths.

Magritte echoed this assertion in 1963 in a letter to Harry Torcyzner, a collector and close friend of the artist. Alongside a sketch related to his 1958 L'État de veille gouaches, Magritte discusses the underlying notions of visual perception and comprehension which inspired them: “The new picture I’m thinking of entails (if need be) that I avoid dreaming and dreaming even while knowing that I’m dreaming. It’s a question of what the world offers us and which we cannot overlook if we’re aware…. These are houses of various sizes (as houses are), but this difference in size is not ‘unnoticed’ here, and for that reason seems ‘odd’” (translated in Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, Paris and New York, 1977, p. 261).

While the merging of the sky and building motif gained prominence in Magritte’s oeuvre in the 1950s, the artist’s earlier compositions reveal his nascent interest in the juxtaposition of such themes. Though he had yet to combine the motifs into one image, Magritte’s L’Idée fixe from 1928 features discrete quadrants of a forest, sky, façade and hunter in one composition, the arrangement of which is later expanded upon in his Au Seuil de la liberté from 1937 (Art Institute of Chicago).

Magritte first alighted upon the notion of such metamorphosis, of the confusion between and the fusion of two objects, in the late 1920s. “I believe I’ve made an altogether startling discovery in painting… I have found a new possibility things may have: that of gradually becoming something else—an object melting into an object other than itself. For instance, at certain spots sky allows wood to appear. I think that this is something totally different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two materials, no boundary. In this way I obtain pictures in which the eye ‘must think’ in a way entirely different from the usual…” (René Magritte in a letter to Paul Nougé in 1927, quoted in Pere Gimferrer, Magritte, New York, 1986, p. 16).

This mechanism of confusion between objects proved particularly fruitful, and Magritte never ceased to offer the viewer such instances where wooden doors give way to horizons, where tables turn to stone, and buildings fade to sky. These metamorphoses give rise to a conceptual conflict which challenges the viewer, disrupting typical habits of perception and thwarting one’s certainties. This has resulted in works such as L’État de veille, uncanny in their equivocation and exceptional in execution, which retain all their power to amaze.