In this carefully composed photograph, Marcel Mariën once again explores the boundary between desire, illusion and absurdity. Characteristic of his surrealist practice, the work combines an ordinary image with an unexpected intervention, creating a subtle visual contradiction that challenges conventional perception.

Mariën understood photography as a conceptual medium rather than a documentary one. Every element is deliberately positioned to transform the familiar into something ambiguous, allowing humour and critical reflection to coexist within a single image.

Marcel Mariën (1920–1993) left school at fifteen to apprentice with a photographer, and in 1937 sought out René Magritte, quickly becoming one of the most prolific and irreverent members of the Belgian surrealist circle. Though he set photography aside for years in favour of writing and publishing — founding the review Les Lèvres Nues in 1954 — he returned to the medium in 1983, producing some of his most striking images in the decade before his death in Brussels in 1993.