This is not a pipe?

Surrealist Magritte painted a pipe. He called the painting “this is not a pipe”. What you see in the painting is not the pipe itself but an image of a pipe. The painting created a paradox between images corresponding to words. 

Sometimes life imitates art. Let’s go back a couple of weeks on the news. The image of part of a forest in flames, “this is not a fire”, glaciers retreating around the world, “this is not an iceberg”, a land without water, a strong hurricane Dorian “this is not climate change”. Is it the return of Surrealism? 

Surrealism is my golden age. Golden age, for those who didn’t see Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, is the notion that a different time period is better than the one we’re living in the present. The goal of surrealism was the use of free thought, language and experiences to express an idea outside the boundaries of reality. And I love that. But as much as I love surrealism, we are still better off because we have the technology for real-time images and we’re free to speak (or at least most of us are) and to see things as they really are.

A disgruntled gunman on a shooting spree, “this is not white nationalism”. At a time when words are devoid of real meaning we must turn to images and art. Let the powerful images that we see today enlighten us. Let this be our age of enlightenment, the age of reason. Let us allow the images to illuminate our minds and let our imagination dream up solutions to problems that can still be managed and to communicate them without prejudice.

Just as newspapers rely on photojournalists and scientists depend on satellite images, we turn to images to market ourselves, market our lives and sell our products. Why is it then so hard to trust the power of images to seek the truth? With images, what you see is what you get (if you’re not altering the images). However, words associated with them can paint quite a different reality. 

I bet that any surrealist painter or writer would love 2019 and the freedom that we have to explore any topic and to say what we want - and to then state that we never said it, if we want. Let there be light. Let their art inspire us but in the meantime, let’s keep it real.