This is a pipe 2005 “…the mistake of most painters is that they paint: “I love this here”; in doing so, their love stays in their pointed finger. But all love should be used up in the act of painting so that only remains: “here is this” and the spectator should look very carefully if he loves it himself”. From: letters about Cézanne, Rainer Maria Rilke. THIS IS A PIPE. The acquired naivety of painting. In January 1994, on an acquaintance-trip with participants and staff of the Rijksacademy of visual art, I saw “the Harvest” by Pieter Breughel the elder for the first time. Seeing this painting in a room between works by Ruysdael and van Goyen, I was overwhelmed by its ambition to be the entire world. There was nothing in this Harvest that wanted to be anything less. The feeling that I was inside the painting and could walk along the resting farmer, through the path between the uncut wheat to the village and from there into the forest behind it, became stronger than I had ever ex-perienced in front of a painting before. It probably was not even the thing I had been looking for in paintings at all. I realized that a part of me believed that entering the Harvest could be the start of a journey that would eventually lead to places that where not on the picture. It was not a thought; one can think a lot of exiting thoughts in front of a painting, but to temporary believe that you enter it is a different thing. I must have been a little red on the cheeks when I stepped back and walked over to the Ruysdael. I almost immediately saw what the problem with this beautiful painting was: when I looked close enough I could almost hear the painting say:” Isn’t it a miracle!; from this close you see only painted strokes; but take only one step back and I am a river!, trees!, clouds!”. I returned to the Harvest and brought my eyes near the surface: there was only the wheat, the village and the forest; no painted strokes to be seen. I left the metropolitan museum and walked my way to the MoMa repeating to myself: A painting should be the entire world!, a painting should be the entire world! But that was not all: there was still another lesson to be learned that day. Knowing his works only in reproduction, I always thought Magritte was a lousy painter (and the whole of surrealism was stupid anyway. Peter Struycken once said to me: “You know, the problem with the surrealists is: they have no fantasy”). Inside the MoMa I savoured Monet and the demoi-selles. The only reason I lingered in the surrealist rooms was because David Bowie stood there looking at de Chirico. Not wanting to bother him but neither wanting to leave, I started studying the painting in front of me. It was the Magritte painting with the slice of ham with an eye in the centre. Although the eye irritated me enormously I became increasingly fascinated with the way the ham, the wine bottle and the glass were painted. There was something very strange to it: the only thing I thought was: ham; wine bottle; glass. Dry, bold and shallow, there was no beauty, nothing photo-graphic, almost no colour. The objects where present like words. It did not have the impact of the Harvest but I felt that the two experiences where in a certain way linked. (What I know is that I closed Magritte in my heart with the agreement that I could consider his sur-realistic imagery as a bad habit. Later I did the same with Luc Tuymans’ emphasis on his subject matter: to consider it as a bad habit; a cover up in poor times that will beforgiven when silence is returned around his work and his true engagement to the “how” will be crystal clear.) Understanding my New York experiences took some time. It was a paradox: I longed for insight to use in my own work and at the same time I knew that what I had seen was a certain kind of na-ivety; a monism. Some clarity came to me in the form of an essay by the Dutch playwright and es-sayist Willem Jan Otten in which he stated that it is the final purpose of art to be credible and that content and meaning should be considered as tools to this aim. This made sense to me; it ex-plained why I was so irritated by Magritte’s eye in the slice of ham and so strangely moved by his wine bottle. The eye is used as a tool for content; it means: the world is stranger than you think. The bottle says: bottles are to be seen in the world; so what is the difference between paint and glass? I slowly and secretly began to believe that the true ambition of painting was to say: “this is a pipe” and at the same time that this striving had nothing to do with naturalism. Naturalism is based on the idea that there is a continuous visual world to which painting could be compared; in the natural-istic ideology, painters are considered to be more or less able to make their work look like this vis-ual world or that they deliberately choose to make works that differ from it. In reality there is no reason to believe in such a thing, the world looks different in different times and for different people and painting is the history of these changing appearances. It is the entrance. In the gestures of painting intention and outcome fuse. The aim is to make us believe what we see. It is not neces-sary to be afraid of red, yellow and blue but it is neither necessarily meaningful to separate them from Roses, Daffodils and Irises. Gijs Frieling