Journey to a painting: 'The lovers', by René Magritte
It's normal, because he painted it a surreal and "surreal" comes from the French “sur-realism” , that is, it is above realism . And that is even more realism than the real thing. Is not that the surrealists were visionaries -No more than any artist, it is understood-, it is just that the lessons he gave had been studied Freud , who has already placed us before the question of whether the physical reality will not be as real as the imagined one. To this we respond now that both are one and the same thing, or that at least they end up converging, as we are verifying in our own flesh.
To understand what is real – “real as life itself”, we say - we always arrive with some delay. And that displacement has a function, which is none other than to cushion the blow. Or have we already forgotten that until very recently we were hearing how unreal all this that we now live seemed to us? What else was like a dream, a nightmare, a science fiction movie? Didn't we even say it ourselves?
Rene Magritte
This must have happened to Rene Magritte when he was fourteen years old and it is believed that he saw how the body of his mother was taken out of the Sambre river as if he were a perch and with all the nightgown tied around his head. That poor Régina had taken her own life by throwing herself into the water could not be more real , but I would bet anything that the young René thought then that he had been transported to the world of unreality, and that it was from that world that he was perceiving an experience so traumatic that it would haunt him in the following years. So he had to paint 'Lovers' to get rid of such horror by giving it to the world.
Some deal with trauma creating a parallel universe , and we call them mentally ill and have them treated. And then there are artists like Magritte, who turn that sore into something else: art is also a form of parallel universe, although it is always part of the one we are in and with it converges. But most people simply accept reality as soon as they are ready for it.
We too are beginning to understand now that it is real that we spend almost all the time confined to our houses . That it is real that when we go out we find the streets almost empty. Real that if we meet someone we lower our eyes and quicken our pace, and divert our course to respect safety distances. Real that health professionals can't cope , who are real and not angels or comic book heroes at all, by the way. And that we live pending the degrees of inclination of a curve . A curve that is real because, no matter how much we see it traced on axes that only exist on our digital screens, talks about real infections, real people and real losses that they cry with real tears even though it is real that mourning is not allowed as it was before they inflicted on us this wound of the real.
I wrote recently Santiago Alba Rico in eldiario.es that in times of virtual experiences and disaffection with the world of things, this (re)encounter with the real is also, or should be, an opportunity . And he was quite right. At some point we will leave our homes, and reality will be different , but it will be, and we should have learned something from what we are now experiencing. We will learn something for sure , because we are all saying it, but we still don't know what . That will also come to us with a little delay.
Like these Magritte lovers , isolated from the world and also from each other by a piece of fabric, we are torn between uncertainty and frustration. But we have already begun to live normally with them, so at least we know the ground we tread. We just have to build something on that land , because what we build now will be time gained tomorrow.
Journey to a painting: 'The lovers', by René Magritte