Magritte's The Return(1940)

The Return, is a 480 X 610 art print, has a blue sky, a cut out of clouds in the shape of a bird, and on the bottom is a nest with three eggs. The name of the artwork, make us think what does the artist mean by The Return?. The very simple interpretation is the return of the mother bird to its nest, as a protector. Applying semiotics (study of signs and symbols) theory, blue sky and white clouds is symbol of spirituality, as soul, a return of life after death. The eggs at the bottom on the floor, shows the seed/ beginning of life. The bird, in the shape of a dove, as a protector symbolizes the presence of god or holy spirit watching over a new beginning. The surrealistic artwork puts together two realms of existence: life and after-life(soul), (life as signifier and soul as the significant) and there is a connection between them. There is no end to life; our body and soul are two different constituents existing together, like two sides of a coin, when we die, our life continues in the form of soul/spirit. 

"Rene Magritte's surrealness is real, found in everyday things transplanted to another world until they have lost their everyday thingness."- Paul Page

Magritte, “makes the invisible, visible”- concept of spirituality. Complex and structured environments, they provoke both strong somatic responses and wide-ranging metaphorical associations that, together, weave a nexus of layered, non discursive meanings. Dewey insists that an aesthetic act is not complete until the viewer/reader/listener is able to "emulate the operation" undertaken by the artist. When the painter and the poet succeed in incorporating "medium" in the outcome, that is, in creating a work of art, the work in turn provides the viewer and the reader with a potentially rich aesthetic experience that becomes all the richer when they are able to perceive the way the medium itself is being "used structurally" to create an aesthetic whole that precedes any "idea" the work putatively conveys.

Recognition and recollection --a kind of understanding based in memory and past experience that bypasses or even precedes intellection -- are the principal tools for apprehending spiritualistic experience, which helps in enhancing creation of art work. Everything is surrounded by the mists of significations which carry the mind in many directions, all according to knowledge, interest, and level of awareness brought to bear at any given moment when we happen to look around. Of course, all these perceptions involve signs and the mind in knowing may make comparisons among objects of which it is aware, and from these comparisons relations do indeed result. Our thought becomes a power of source/knowledge, providing possibilities of meaning and of truth that lie outside empirical seizure or proof- the root-impulse of the human spirit. There are values and energies in the human person -- and an inner voice which cannot be revealed with analytical and empirical tools. Magritte’s artwork provide access to such intimations, intimations which if inimical to reason are nonetheless instinctual to humanity- the sixth sense –spirituality, proving the simple analogy,

Art is experience,

Experience is knowledge,

Knowledge is spiritual

Art is spiritual.