In terms of composition and colour tones, the work “Ceci n’est pas la pipe de Rene Magritte” (This is Not Rene Magritte’s Pipe) is a reference to the works from the 1960s and as such symbolically concludes the artist’s oeuvre. It is a paraphrase of the famous Magritte painting “The Treachery of Images” (1929, oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm), an iconic work in the modernist canon. With “The Treachery of Images”, Rene Magritte pointed to the inevitable limitations of representations of the real world, which had accompanied and plagued art since Plato and his description of our conception of reality in his parable of the cave. The title “Ceci n’est pas la pipe de Rene Magritte (This is Not Rene Magritte’s Pipe)” patently points to the fact that the painting refers to Magritte’s painting, with the important distinction that it is without any inscription. With this painting, at the end of his creative path and life, Bogdan Borčić transcended the dichotomy between mimetic and abstract painting and realised that it is impossible to escape representation, because it is simply inherent to art.

Text: Jernej Kožar