the human condition & the problem of the window

"The problem of the window gave rise to La Condition Humane. In front of a window as seen from the interior of the room, I placed a painting (canvas and easel) that represented precisely the portion of landscape concealed by the painting. For instance the tree represented in the painting displaced the tree behind the painting outside the room. For the viewer the tree is simultaneously inside the room in the painting and outside the room in the real landscape."

"This is how we see the world, we see it outside ourselves; and yet the only representation of it is within us. Similarily we sometimes remember a past event and the memory makes it a present event. Time and space lose that crude meaning which is the only one we have in our daily experience."

[Magritte, Translated from a 1938 lecture, La Ligne de vie]

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