Surreal space in René Magritte's Le Blanc-Seing (1965).

Abstract

"The function of painting is to make poetry visible… to render thought visible." René Magritte Pictorial art reveals some of the visual brain's "neural rules" and processing hierarchy. This article examines one salient exemplar drawn from the vast oeuvre of the great Belgian surrealist, René Magritte (1898-1967). The painting Le Blanc-Seing (1965) is a virtual course in perception, with many elements illustrating figure-ground segregation, object identification, cues for depth perception, Gestalt Laws of occlusion-continuation, and visual scene organization. Le Blanc-Seing is visually stunning, beautifully rendered, and, at first glance, otherwise unremarkable. However, Magritte has embedded several jarring surreal effects in the painting that provide clues about the visual brain's visual processing hierarchy in scene construction. This includes elements whose alternation between two incompatible percepts cannot be explained in terms of local spatiochromatic statistics (Ritchie & van Buren, 2020). Finally, I provide a plausible pictorial inspiration (never before demonstrated) for the painting in a brief scene from a 1924 German silent film.