Surrealism In Rene Magritte's The Persistence Of Memory

Surrealism is a radical, aesthetic movement that transformed both materiality, and the very being of art itself. Surrealism deals with internal contradiction, incoherence, and the marvelous, with a conjunction of disparate objects to bring forth a movement of love and liberation. Unlike a majority of the French surrealists, Rene Magritte placed a great emphasis on ideas surrounding enigma, and representations of mystery. Magritte is well known for blurring the lines between the real and the imagined within Surrealism. The works of Magritte are not similar to the works of the fellow surrealists at the time such as Salvador Dali, or even deal with the same ideologies of automatism and objective chance. Instead, Magritte was indoubly fascinated

2), one can see how both surrealists were fascinated with marvelous objects as objects of thought, and how starkly different their interpretations of reality are.. Although both objects present ideas of reality vs. representation, their overall message and form convey different aesthetics of juxtaposition, both ones that are not meant to attest to and reject symbolism, while exemplifying surrealist notions surrounding the material world, dream, and

The Perception of Memory is an oil on canvas painting, depicting several melted clocks in a desert-like environment. Dali evokes a sense of stillness and quietness in the environment by presenting a lot of negative space, and a featureless objects such as the sky. We also get a sense of stillness because the water has no ripples or waves. The objects depicted in the painting are not naturalistic, because of their organic nature. For example, there is a dead tree that is growing out of a table-top. There are also ants that are eating away at a time piece, rather than eating plants. We also see a sense of harshness, and softness. The watches all seem to be soft which may be indicative of the power our subconscious mind has, and the power over man-made objects and the conscious mind. The softness of the watches allows them to lose their power, and importance. Time is thus illustrated as fluid. Dali uses hyper-realism to depict the passing of time while in a dream-like state.Time is something that rules us, and can be associated with an industrial culture. Time is also something that is supposed to be permanent, and reliable. In dream, time seems to have no power, so the clocks are thus responding to the environment, and melting away into decay.Dali is able to prove that the irrational world is just as