EMAIL: ph.gibone@wanadoo.fr
NAME: Philippe Gibone
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Art is more real than reality
COUNTRY: France
RENDERER USED: Povray for Windows V3.5
TOOLS USED: MORAY, SmokeGen by Mikael Carneholm, ISO_CSG by Christoph Hormann 
            some of my own Moray plugins or Macros: KNOT, PARQUET, WALL, DOMENATOR, IVY.
JPGFILE: ARTREAL.jpg
RENDER TIME: 1h52
HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz, with 128Mb ram, XP
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
(First I must apologize for my lousy english, and for such a long explanation)
The Title is " Art is more real than reality " hence, by essence, it is surreal
The composition of this picture starts from the famous sentence by Lautreamont 
" Beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine 
and an umbrella ".  
One can easily sees the umbrella and the sewing machine; the table is a representation of 
the proof by dissection of the Pythagoras' theorem, this gives us a dissecting table, but, 
as a bonus it takes us to the mathematics, that are, as surrealism, the privileged land of 
free imagination (non Euclidean geometry, Gödel's theorem…), it's a science which doesn't
deal with reality.
In the glass triangle in the middle of the table of dissection, there is an eye, as the one 
of Horus which is a Babylonian symbol (the eye that sees all, knows all) and represents  
knowledge.  
The cloud colored pupil reminds us several Magritte's paintings, but also the cloud of 
"Un Chien Andalou "(aka An Andalusian Dog) : in this movie directed by Luis Buñuel (the only 
authentically surrealist film director), one sees a cloud that passes in front of the moon, 
and in the next sequence, a woman's eye is sliced by a razor, as a redundancy of the moon 
sliced by the clouds.  
Dali is cosignatory of the film, but it has been said that he didn't do much, and that the 
film was especially Buñuel (hence the heavy absence of Dali)

The apple is the one of the picture of Magritte called " Ceci n'est pas une pomme" 
(This is not an apple), but the character doesn't understand why.

Of course the Grail represents the legend, the magic.
The cigarette smoke represents the ephemeral and the intangible
The museum has no walls because art has no, nevertheless, History (the Greek column) and 
Nature (the ivy), show limits that art has not to respect (the picture beyond the limits of 
the museum), but that the " visitors " respect.  
Art is sometimes out of reach, and we need help to attain it (the ladder)
The painting on the right represents… the very same scenery, because art is way ahead of 
reality.
The human beings are represented by rough wooden silhouettes, for they are not as real as 
the other elements, even their thoughts are not real (while normally…) :

To conclude: art, mathematics, legends, magic, knowledge, ephemeral and intangible are more 
real than the reality, and especially more real than the " visitors of art "

Therefore the subtitle:

"Chance encounter of Lautreamont and of an apple standing on the Holy Grail, under the Eye 
of Horus, not yet dissected by Bunuel in the heavy absence of Gödel and Dali, but in the 
shadow of Pythagoras"

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
The Apple is a triangle mesh, the wooden silhouettes are simple 2D Black and white rough 
drawings used as heightfield. The big painting outside the museum is another POV image made 
with the help of a tree macro by Joachim Puerschel and the People macro by Hero Ngauv.
I have to thank Sylvain Leseur, whose unvaluable help was absolutely necessary to achieve this
entry.