Magritte and the Metafor: Deconstructing the Silence of Visual Language

Abstract

The subject that will be studied in this article is the intrinsic relationship between writing and image, literature and painting. In order to illustrate this relationship, among the vast variety of visual tropes represented in René Magritte’s pictures (1898-1967), metaphor will be studied as a paradigmatic example. The importance of carrying out this study lies in the fact that Magritte is a very popular painter, but often misunderstood. It is necessary to deny that his painting is purely literary; it is rather a visual poetry. It is sought to demonstrate how the composition of its visual metaphors is not arbitrary, but it determines the cognitive processes involved in both understanding and the construction of meaning by the subject-viewer. The approach adopted is the field of comparative literature, according to which visual metaphor differs from metaphor as verbal rhetorical figure recognizing its own identity. After the study, the visual metaphor is revealed not only as a display of beauty, but first and foremost as an invitation to glare.