Remedios Varo: Science Fictions

The introduction to this catalogue of this perfectly amazing painter-writer-scientist, a poet in everything she undertook, is entitled “Spirit, Matter, Story, Soul” and so says it all. The paintings, all of them, a trio of which we saw at the recent Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at the Met Museum, so enraptured the visitors to the several rooms of the very spectacular show Surrealism Beyond Borders that by far the largest crowd was gathered before the trinity of paintings. Trinity is in fact the correct term, for these works breathe at once a ritualistic magic, a musical sonority, and a captivating story line such as I do believe—and I really do believe—we have not previously encountered. Something really beyond any borders recently encountered anywhere, even outside the museum structure. We left, I think I can speak for most of us there, imbued with a kind of strange—yes, strange—feeling of beyond the borders we previously knew of and, oh well, inhabited.

So what was it, is like it, like? The first time I met up with Remedios Varo was at the New York Academy of Science, not my usual literary hangout, but my publisher, Michael Leaman of Reaktion Books, had signaled to me the crucial importance of this artist-scientist-writer. Full disclosure: I somehow dragged my professor-like (not entirely-writer-like) self to that exhibition and was blown over, torpedoed, by this encounter. How amazing that this exhibition of this beyond-all-possible painter-scientist who was part of magic realism and surrealism was right here in New York in a building I never frequented before!

SO OF COURSE, how not, I remained and remain now, captivated by this VERY PECULIAR being! Painter, writer, everything-er. She did and wrote and explored and painted so much. Her inturning and outurning lead any reader and observer all over everywhere. Do I love her poems? YES. Do I love and appreciate her variegated and surprising history of here and thereness? Why in the world would such a surprising personage not grab a simple soul like me? Exploring the magical arts also in everyday life was Remedios Varo’s way of being.

I have, absolutely have! To bring into here the various techniques Remedios Varo conquered and utilized: Blotting, Cartoon, Decalcomania, Erasure, Grattage, Hatching, Incising, Inlay , Sanding, Scumbling, Sgraffito, Smudging, Soufflage, Spattering, Sponging, Squaring, Stippling, Textured Gesso. Thinning, Tidelihe, Transfer, Underdrawing, and Varnishing. Now, I have listed them as they appear, fearing to reduce the excitement by minimizing them or reducing them: THESE are the techniques that the great artist Remedios Varo knew about , utilized, and leaves us with.

Among the astonishments, let me dwell a bit on the Triptych, that trio of images before which that extraordinary bunch of observers assembled. It is described as three moments “in the life story of a young woman who ‘resists hypnos.’” The paintings Towards the Tower (1961)” Embroidering the Earth's Mantle (1961)” and The Escape (1962) were never physically joined and were then dispersed. But the title of course associates them with the rituals of devotional art. “The lapis lazuli and hammered gold leaf of religious painting; and the style of the architecture mirrors the biographical scenes and deeds of a Byzantine or Eastern Orthodox Vita icon with three key moment form our protagonist’s life providing a sense of temporal spiritual progression.” This work impacts Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1956, published in 1974) and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) encounters these works “seemingly at Galeria Juan Martin in 1962. Oedipa Maas dies in front of this painting.”

Interestingly La Huida (The Escape)is the only one in all her work that contains a couple in a vehicle: usually Varo’s travelers are alone in their voyage. This time she may have chosen that fantastic vessel as another representation of “the cradle rediscovered and the mother’s womb” but in addition to that possibility, she may have been remembering that in Buddhism, the umbrella (somewhat like the vessel) unites heaven and earth with the ferrule being the connector, and the golden mist serving as atmosphere around the vault like an inverted protective umbrella.

And finally, the pairing of man and woman relates to the “separation and synthesis of opposites in an alchemical wedding of sun and moon, masculine and feminine principles.” The man and woman are equals, as she leads and controls the rudder, while he holds the sails. Like Adam and Eve in Noah’s Ark “sailing through a gold mist that evokes the Ark of the Covenant as described in Exodus.” The teachings of Gurdjieff penetrate everywhere in Varo’s imaginings, as in an earlier painting appropriately labeled Icono(1945), with a stairway: stairways figure frequently in Varo’s paintings, like a striking symbol of her magical/mystical scientific fictions. The absolute splendor of her work penetrates every page of this truly gorgeous catalog. For myself, the fact that Varo had the super surrealist Benjamin Péret as a partner renders her even more fascinating biographically for me, always watchful as I am about surrealism.

To conclude as the catalog concludes,

Varo acknowledged her own experiences as a woman who not only carried her old geographies and histories within herself but also found protection in Mexico City and its artistic community. Overcoming her own fears of war and migration, she blended past, present, and future in her artwork to create her own liberated world, one that offers a model for others as well.