Magritte and identity

While thinking about emotions and identity, I thought about the person's painted by Magritte. These figures hide after objects or disappear within the background. It's frustrating you can't see the person's face and hence its identity. This is actually how we see a person in daily life. People judge you on what they see, your facial expression, the clothes you are wearing, but underneath all that there maybe a whole other identity than you expected.


“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible,” Rene Magritte once lamented. “Humans hide their secrets too well.” Born on this date in 1898, Magritte created mind-bending, Surrealist images that held up a mirror to humanity and showed it just how many secrets it kept from itself. In The Son of Man (above, from 1964) Magritte’s omnipresent bowler-wearing man in an anonymous dark suit hides behind a green apple. Whether that man’s identity lurks behind the sins symbolized by that Adam’s apple of Original Sin or if identity itself is the “sin” in unclear. Magritte sees identity itself as a state of crisis, something we can never fully grasp or understand yet something continually in peril.

From: http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2007/11/identity-crisis.html