KASK
SCHOOL
René Magritte, La bonne fortune (1945), oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm. Courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Photo: J. Geleyns.
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CONSERVATORIUM
ARTS
Das Bewusstschwein. Het bewustzwijn. This could be an alternative title for Magritte’s La bonne fortune. Apart from the tiny eyes with which it looks at us in a penetrating way, helplessly asking recognition for being human, it is a swine in all its features. The ‘Bewusstswine’ only exists as the pig that it is not. And as a sort of compensation for this nothingness, as if it is giving shape to this nothingness, a petrified phallus is rising up behind the pig, causing both a sad and a hilarious effect. Where can we find the human here? He drops out, between the hoggishness in which he is captured and the monument that commemorates him.
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