Time Transfixed

A miniature steam locomotive, puffing smoke, emerges impossibly from the opening of a fireplace beneath a mantel set with a clock and candlesticks reflected in the mirror above. Rene Magritte juxtaposes the homely hearth with the hurtling train to jolt the mind out of habit - the everyday made suddenly strange and dreamlike. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, Time Transfixed (a loose rendering of his French title) is among his most memorable images - a quiet domestic room invaded by a small, gleaming impossibility, the uncanny conjured from the calm collision of two ordinary things.