René Magritte

Les Derniers voiliers presents one of Magritte’s simplest, yet most visually striking themes, that of reality versus representation, which appears throughout his œuvre in various forms and guises. Images of objects concealed by or replaced by other, unexpected ones, recur throughout his work, as is the device of the juxtaposition between ‘reality’ and its verbal or visual manifestations. In the present work, the vehicle for exploring this theme is found in undefined forms that hang above the water, suspended in the sky, a device that goes back to Magritte’s paper cut-outs of the 1920s. Replicating the sea motif, and taking on strangely abstract shapes, in other instances they are made up of sky or trees, and often they take an uncannily human shape, or that of another object (fig. 1). Although painted, they play the role of collage of papier collé, and appear to be pasted onto the background, thereby revealing its illusionistic, two-dimensional quality.

"The [present] work is based on the idea of simultaneity. The indistinct shapes, flying in the air above the sea, use the same motif as that of the waves, evoking then simultaneously the sea and sails" (Les Peintres Surréalistes. Delvaux, Ensor, Labisse, Magritte... (exhibition catalogue), Galerie d'Orsay, Paris, 1999, p. 36).

Fig. 1, René Magritte, Le Séducteur, 1950, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond