The portrait of the man can be viewed as a variation on Magritte's painting "The Son of Man", in which a man's face is hidden behind an apple. Magritte had the following to say:

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."