From the 22nd November to the 29th March 2009 the rooms of Palazzo Reale in Milan will house the works of one of the most important and original figures of Surrealism, René Magritte. As preannounced in the title of the event, “The mystery of Nature”, about a hundred works will highlight the artist’s relationship with nature, seen not as a petty manifest phenomenon, but as a fleeting mystery to investigate. The Milanese exhibition aims at commending the creative genius of one of the rare nineteenth century artists who dealt with the theme of nature, placing it at the centre of his research, relating it with the limits and the undertones of contemporary reality. Therefore, there will be paintings, temperas and sculptures, which come from the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts in Belgium, representing the world’s most important public collection of Magritte’s works, and from numerous private collections. The Belgian painter’s approach to the theme of Nature will be investigated according to a chronological order, marked by his different creative steps and by the maturation of his expressive language, starting from the first and sometimes hardly known paintings of the phase of futuristic research - experienced thanks to Pierre Floquet – passing on to the most mysterious and gloomy images from the period between the two Wars, arriving at the most known products from the Fifties onwards. 
It seems almost improper to talk about nature when we think of one of the pioneers of oneiric art, however, it is nevertheless true that to reach the surreal dimension it is necessary to know the features of reality, to then go beyond it and convert it with the aid of alienating and bizarre elements.
If in Bretonnian avant-garde psychic automatism, for many surrealist exponents, was a routine operation that banished the supremacy of rationality, Magritte singularly did not aim at making the human subconscious emerge, but rather at penetrating the mysteries of the universe. Therefore, the Belgian artist, not by chance defined as “le saboteur tranquille”, did not disown the naturalistic representation, but on the contrary he emphasised its features leading it to contradiction, to the typical extravagance of dreams, through a subtle conceptual mechanism. A flawless and rigorous representation technique – which betrays Magritte’s graphical debut– is subjected to the game of allusions and of shifting of the senses, to the will to freeze the representation of an image in which there is no sharing.  Magritte himself justified the repeated use in his paintings of the process of hybridization (intended as a co-presence of situations or elements incompatible with each other in the intent to give life to an non-existent reality): «The images are to be seen as they are, I love images whose meaning is unknown because the meaning of the mind itself is unknown».  Therefore, Magritte’s represents an elusive nature, which he insistently questions with the purpose of understanding it, but achieving only further questions and never any answers.
Some of the Belgian artist’s masterpieces that will be on display are «Souvenir de voyage» from 1961, a work in which the protagonist is a green apple wearing a mask, and then «L’heureux donateur» and «Le bouquet tout fait» with the recurrent silhouette of a man wearing a bowler hat, «La magie noire» and the famous «L’empire des lumières» - in which night and day are depicted simultaneously – which the artist himself thus defined: «In the empire of lights I represented two different ideas, being a sky by night and a sky as we see it during the day. The landscape recalls the night and the sky recalls the day. I think that this contemporaneity of day and night has the power to surprise and enchant. I call this power poetry.»
The exhibition is curated by Michel Draguet, one of the main experts of the surrealist artist and director general of the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts in Belgium, and Claudia Beltramo Ceppi, in collaboration with Charly Herscovici, president of the René Magritte Foundation, and Paolo Vedovi, planned by Claudia Zevi and Partners, and produced by the City of Milan - Palazzo Reale with A2A, Civita and Giunti Arte, and the prestigious collaboration of the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique and of the Fondation Magritte.

Exhibition website: www.mostramagritte.it

(Translated by Giorgina Arcuri)