New Series: Fruit of the Gloom

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments

You know these ideas you carry around in your head, the ones about which you think “that would be cool, I’ll do that some day”? I’ve finally come around to implement one of them.

I’m a big admirer of René Magritte‘s work; a Belgian painter, Magritte lived in the first half of the 20th century to create a series of enchanting, often amusing, but always thoughtful surrealist artworks; among them are the often copied La trahison des images (1929) and a multitude of pictures featuring ominous men in black suits and bowler hats.

Picasso once said “Art is a lie that leads us to the truth”. Magritte, using the strange toolbox surrealists can access, combined those lies in unusual ways to create unique visual experiments. For instance, he juxtaposed the image of a street at night-time under a daylit sky (l’empire des lumières, 1954), or depicted women and birds made out of different materials, such as clouds or stone.

One of these experiments have especially fascinated me ever since I can remember seeing Magritte’s paintings: He put ordinary objects – an apple, a shaving set, a rose – into a room, blown up to a disproportionate size. When looking at these images, the mind tries to overcome the resulting cognitive dissonance by either imagining the room as dollhouse-sized, or – much more fun – by imagining a huge object stuck in a room, wondering how it came and what it’s supposed to do there.

As an hommage to Magritte and his disproportionate objects, I have taken stock photos of fruit, and stuck them in factory halls that I have found on my urban exploration tours. The series is called Fruit of the Gloom. Check it out below: