In this volume, Massimo Donà, a philosopher who has always divided his interests between the theoretical field and the aesthetic, focuses on the analysis of one of the most representative figures of the artistic production of Twentieth Century: Rene Magritte. A Belgian artist whose production is perhaps one of the most significant icons of contemporary imagination. But the author focuses here mainly on the 'thought' of Magritte, showing how the technical quality of the writings of the Belgian artist is by no means inferior, but perhaps even superior to that of his paintings.
This agile, but at the same time intense volume, then you see how, in the theoretical work of Magritte, to be brought to their logical conclusion some speculative nodes that may accompany long been an important strand of Western art making. It shows how the amazing power of philosophical Magritte makes the copious amounts of his writings essential interlocutor of other great voices of the century just ended: from Freud to Merleau-Ponty, De Chirico, Breton, Magritte putting the 'philosopher' in close and vital relationship with a philosopher of the stature of Schopenhauer - who in the nineteenth century foreshadowed some of the big issues came to light in all their actual power in the century so-called 'short'.
short, a text that helps the reader to become familiar with the essential meaning of what we usually call "aesthetic experience" and therefore with the puzzle set up for each of us to make an absolutely extra-ordinary as that of art, or , with its magnificent but at the same time essentially 'Incomprehensible' productions. That works, as he knew Magritte, talks about everything except the content that they nevertheless seem to be committed to represent.
Few, in fact, as the artist in question - and in these pages Donà it is highlighted very clearly - have managed to understand that the stakes in a real artistic production, is never something on the human psyche (hence his refusal to give his work a psychoanalytic meaning, and therefore the controversy with Breton), or explanatory, however, as to the way the world actually holds for each of our lives, but calls into cause rather than what Magritte defines as the mysterious silence of the world. That is, the essential enigma consists not so much this or that way of existing, but the simple fact that something 'is'. Thereby showing how art and philosophy, in a century, most recently to formulate the same disturbing and perhaps unnecessary demand on just the "why something rather than nothing?"
Title: The mystery of existence. Art, Truth and Meaning in the theoretical René Magritte
Author: Massimo Donà
ISBN 8884834325 - pp. 150 13.00 Euro
