Magrittre’s series of pipe paintings is fascinating en perplexing. Consider The Two Mysteries above. Focusing on the inner painting, you the message that symbols and pipe are different. Then your glance moves upward to the “real” pipe floating in the air—you perceive that it is real, while the other one is just a symbol. But that is of course totally wrong: both of them are on the same flat surface before your eyes. The idea is that one pipe is a complete fallace. Once you are willing to “enter the room” you have already been tricked: you have fallen for image as reality. To be consistent in your gullibly, you should happily go one level further down, and confuse image-within image with reality. The only way not to be sucked in is to see both pipes merely as colored smudges on a surface a few inches in front of your nose. Then, and only then, do you appreciate the full meaning of the written message “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”—but ironically, at the very instant everything turns to smudges, the writing too turns to smudge, thereby losing its meaning! In other words, at that instant the verbal message of the painting self-destructs.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
