René Magritte (1898-1967)

Executed in 1946, Les vases communicants presents the viewer with four burning elements: the taper-like candle and the matches which are associated with fire, the key and bilboquet which are not. In a parody of the workings of the human mind, Magritte has presented these elements in a wooden cabinet, each categorized and arranged as though by some Surrealist collector according to hidden criteria that are beyond our grasp. An impossible and alien logic lies behind this wunderkammer of the impossible.

Taking its title from an essay on dreams written by André Breton, Les vases communicants explicitly appears to investigate the processes of thought and understanding inherent in our waking, and sleeping, comprehension of the world. 'A title,' stated Magritte, ''justifies' the image by completing it. Nietzsche also said 'there is no thought without language'. Could the painting that affects us be a language without thought?' (Magritte, 1943, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. Richard Miller, New York, 1977, p. 203). The disjointed, seemingly associated elements in Les vases communicants certainly bear all the hallmarks of being language without thought, echoing other works in which Magritte placed words and objects in strange compartments while pointing to the hollow limitations of words, and their inability to truly convey meaning or a true idea of the objects they describe. This was a subject that was of great interest to Magritte, and which he frequently tackled both in his painting and in his writing, not least in his famous illustrated essay Les mots et les choses. In Les vases communicants, Magritte takes elements both familiar and uncanny, places them in a deliberately banal context, and thereby stingingly attacks human communication, categorization, and the arbitrary composition of our thoughts.