Magic Realism
マジック・リアリズム / 1925–1970s / Style / Figurative Painting
Painting whose handling is scrupulously realist, yet whose light, placement and silence tip reality one notch out of true. It uses none of Surrealism's distortions; instead it sets ordinary things down with uncanny clarity, summoning unease and stillness at once. The name comes from German art criticism of 1925.
Hard, evenly distributed light / Description of uncanny clarity / Figures and objects held motionless / Arrangements that are never explained
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Brand photography and film stills that must feel calm and slightly wrong: fragrance, luxury goods, speculative fiction · Editorial illustration for essays whose subject is ordinary life seen from an angle that will not resolve
- Type
- A quiet transitional serif, generously letterspaced, kept well clear of the image so it never explains it.
- Composition
- A single frontal scene with one object placed where the eye does not expect it, surrounded by a wide and undisturbed margin.
- Material
- Matte, non-reflective stock and an even shadowless colour field: no grain, no gloss, nothing that suggests the picture was handled.
- Caution
- Reaching for melting clocks and impossible bodies: the moment the description breaks, the work is Surrealist, and the particular chill of the ordinary held too clearly is gone.
- Further study
- Franz Roh's coining of the term in 1925 / Its relation to New Objectivity / The term's transfer to Latin American literature