Surreal Art gives us clues about how the visual brain processes scenes

What is it about?

Rene Magritte said: "The function of art is to make poetry visible, to render thought visible”. Some Neuroscientists believe that the 50,000-year record of pictorial art qualifies it as the oldest ‘brain science’ helping us understand how daubs of paint on a 2-dimensional canvas can elicit a robust 3D scene in your head. Paintings by the Belgian Surreal Artist, Rene Magritte, reveal your own visual brain in action: figures suddenly are seen as background, only to reverse places in the next glance; transparency battles with opacity; objects are distorted, not by the hand of the artist, but by your brain’s drive to “make sense out of a scene”. I discuss how striking Surreal effects in Magritte's paintings help reveal the "neural" rules used by the brain in everyday perception of scenes. This unique perspective applies to all art and will enrich your experience of art.

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Why is it important?

Careful analysis of works by Magritte reveal how the artist implemented subtle details to cause outsized impact on our perception of a scene, what I call "perceptual amplifiers". Magritte was a master at creating visual paradoxes within the context of paintings whose Surreal elements frequently draw us into self-reflection, even into philosophical reflection on the nature of reality. Magritte had a sophisticated understanding of perception as representation in the brain: he explicitly said that we see things as outside of ourselves when, in reality, all we have to work with are representations (neural signals) inside ourselves (in the brain). My paper analyzes the pictorial elements Magritte enlisted to query, and to inspire us to query, the nature of objects and how we come to know reality itself.