Magritte Transfixes Time, Warps Space

♡ The Surrealist Belgian painter Rene Magritte,1898-1967, astounds and surprises us with his thought provoking and intriguing images. Some of this artist-thinker's paintings lead the viewer to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Take, for instance, Magrite's 1938 canvas, Time Transfixed (147 cm x 98 cm) . This work features a locomotive emerging from a fireplace located in a dining room. Above the fireplace a clock shows the time. The image emerges as a painted metaphor for a pivotal tenet of the Theory of Relativity, namely, that traveling at the speed of light, a physical constant of 300.000 kms per second, time dilates so much that it encompasses both past and future and becomes eternal present. Another astonishing painting of Magritte, The Glasshouse, painted a year later, is a small gouache with the dimensions of 32cm x 38cm. This is a portrait of a man resembling the artist. The picture shows the subject's face looking at the viewer in a seemingly impossible way, as the eyes stare at you through skull and hair, simultaneously from the front and the rear. Now, this painting represents a cogent trope of what happens to space when one travels at the velocity of light,300,000 kilometers per second, or approaching this speed. At lightspeed space space undergoes a radical transformation, it infinitely flattens and would becoume infinitely thin around the traveler. The rear would move around to the front and daylight would fuse with nighttime sky. Magritte's painting playfully illustrates the warping of space at the speed of light: due to the compression of space the traveller looking forward cannot see beyond the warped wall of space and the only wisible thing for him would be the back of his head.