Based on all this, we can perceive the latest version of Magritte in This is not a pipe. By placing the image of the pipe and the statement that serves as its caption on the well-defined surface of a painting (to the extent that it is a painting, the letters are merely the image of the letters; to the extent that it is a blackboard, the image is merely the educational extension of a discourse).

By placing this painting on a wooden triangular base, thick and sturdy, Magritte does everything necessary to reconstruct (either through the continuity of a work of art or through the truth of a lesson in things) the common ground between image and language. However, this surface is immediately questioned: because the pipe, which Magritte cautiously approached in the text, has been enclosed along with this institutional rectangle of the painting; look, it has been thrown: it is up there, in a floating position without a point of reference, leaving between the text and the image, which should be the connection and the convergence point on the horizon, nothing but a small empty space, the narrow groove of its absence - something like a mark without a physical description of its escape.

And then, upon its slanted and so visibly unstable supports, nothing remains on the easel but to topple, for the framework to dissolve, for the painting and the pipe to roll to the ground, for the letters to scatter: the common ground - a trite or everyday lesson - has been lost.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]