Being a long time fan and admirer of Rene Magritte's works, I took this task as an opportunity to finally reconstruct one of his best-known paintings, "Man in a Bowler Hat", which is a painting that recalls another painting of his, "The Son of Man".

 

          In surrealist art, an important feeling to establish to the audience is the sense of wonder, as if they were slowly entering into the dreamworld wherein things and concepts are unexplainably bizarre. This same feeling is something I did not want to take away in my own version of the artwork. In the original painting, it was composed as if Magritte "snapped" the picture of the man just as the dove flew in the frame, covering the man's face. Meanwhile, in my reconstructed version, I replaced the dove into something that is more relevant and relatable to the twenty-first  century audience— the (former) Apple logo. The use of the former logo instead of the current one is merely for visual purposes only; to put color in the painting, contrasting the dull colors used for both the man and the background.

 

               My version of Magritte's work is somehow an allegory of how people are at present. The message that I want to convey through this is simple: it is for people to recognize that men are slaves of their own creation, hence the headless man. Apple, being one of the leading technology companies in the world, has highly influenced people in the way they live their lives. However, the word 'influenced' here is ambiguous for the reason that it pertains to both the good and the bad. People are blinded by the narrative that technology leads humanity into solely the state of utopia. Although today's advancements have undeniably made people's lives easier, it is important to understand that anything and everything can be damaging once used to an extreme.