Saturday, 3 October 2026

Magritte used the Schuster trident effect in his painting “The Obstacle of the Void”

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Magritte used the Schuster trident effect in his painting “The Obstacle of the Void”

Magritte's "The Obstacle of the Void", 1965, and Schuster's Impossible Trident, 1964.

Magritte, who preferred to call his art magic realism rather than surrealism, used the recently discovered effect of Schuster's trident in his painting "The Obstacle of the Void". The effect lies in the brain's reaction to the conflict between the foreground and background of a drawing: the background comes forward while the foreground recedes, and we assemble the image out of scattered parts into an unreal whole.

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