 Art can exemplify logical paradoxes, as in some paintings by the surrealist René Magritte, which can be read as semiotic jokes about confusion between levels. In La condition humaine (1933), Magritte depicts an easel (on the real canvas), seamlessly supporting a view through a window which is framed by "real" curtains in the painting. Similarly, Escher's Print Gallery (1956) is a print which depicts a distorted city which contains a gallery which recursively contains the picture, and so ad infinitum. Magritte made use of spheres and cuboids to distort reality in a different way, painting them alongside an assortment of houses in his 1931 Mental Arithmetic as if they were children's building blocks, but house-sized. The Guardian observed that the "eerie toytown image" prophesied Modernism's usurpation of "cosy traditional forms", but also plays with the human tendency to seek patterns in nature.
