Surrealism is an art movement that went back to figuration after the wave of abstract art, but only did so to make even less conventional sense. Surrealists didn't want to show what they saw, but instead, what their unconscious perceived.
Here, Magritte is showing an external world, factual, without much surprise, but when the curtains are opened by an invisible hand, you can see his internal theatre. This piece is called Memoirs of a saint, it features a peaceful sky, a state of happiness linked to spending time in one's imagination. To him "the art of painting is an art of thinking". He wanted to show the way he was experiencing the world and maybe give people another way of seeing it, hence the folded corner, inviting us in.
Surrealists also played a lot with words, inventing "exquisite corpse", a game in which a player writes a word, folds the paper and gives it to the next one, resulting in a wtf sentence that would motivate wild imaginations. They also included words, like the famous "Ceci n'est pas une pipe / This is not a pipe", sometimes used them instead of pictures, sometimes they mixed up the two and even added rebuses to their pieces.
And let's not forget "automatic writing": take a pencil in your hand, think of nothing or everything and just let your hand go.
Here, Magritte is showing an external world, factual, without much surprise, but when the curtains are opened by an invisible hand, you can see his internal theatre. This piece is called Memoirs of a saint, it features a peaceful sky, a state of happiness linked to spending time in one's imagination. To him "the art of painting is an art of thinking". He wanted to show the way he was experiencing the world and maybe give people another way of seeing it, hence the folded corner, inviting us in.
And let's not forget "automatic writing": take a pencil in your hand, think of nothing or everything and just let your hand go.