The Brooklyn Rail

The exhibition Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until November 27, 2023, features the magical work of the Spanish-born, Mexico City-based artist and is the first museum exhibition devoted to her in the United States in more than twenty years. With this exhibition, the Art Institute builds on its institutional commitments to collecting, exhibiting, and contributing to the research on Surrealist work. It also reaffirms the museum’s commitments to recent vital collaborations with Mexican art institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.

The American-Mexican curatorial collaboration of Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq has produced a numinous experience—perhaps even an occultish thin space that aims to alter our perceptions. The exhibition’s didactics are in both English and Spanish, with the titles of the works appearing in Spanish first and the English translation appearing in parentheses. The walls of the gallery are painted violet, which according to the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols is the “color of temperance, clarity of mind, deliberate action, of balance.” Violet lies opposite green, the color of the constructed interior gallery within the gallery, housing Varo’s drawings, crystals, and notebooks. Green evokes connections to magic, associated with the Emerald Tablet, a hermetic text important to occultists like Helena Blavatsky, George I. Gurdjieff, and P.D. Ouspensky—all influential on Varo’s thought. The curators seem to have learned much from studying the body of work the artist produced between 1955 and 1963, acknowledged in the stunning catalogue, designed by Lorraine Wild with typography by Zuzana Licko. They write, “We are still her readers, picking up messages transmitted nearly seventy years ago, with the signal now coming in stronger and stronger.”

Varo’s messages take the form of dizzying images, often illuminating hidden things and fantastic worlds where girls seemingly trapped in a tower embroider their way to freedom, people play cosmic music, and travelers embark in clever contraptions. Conjuring individuals often alone and intensely engaged in curious activities, Varo’s work invites and perplexes close reading. Her meticulous brushstrokes produce mesmerizing objects—orbs that glow, chairs poised on tiny feet, chalices in which moons float. There are occult revelations and references to esoteric ideas, to the tarot, and alchemy. In Armonía (Harmony) (1956), a person works at a cloth-covered table, placing objects on a floating musical staff: crystals, a leaf, torn bits of paper inscribed with mathematical notations, a flower, a mandrake, a pearl. More crystals shimmer in the space, as ethereal assistants emerge from tears in the bluish walls of the room, and floor tiles push up revealing flowers, roots, sheer fabric, a visualization perhaps of the second verse of the cryptic Emerald Tablet, commonly translated “as above, so below.” In another painting, Mimetismo (Mimesis) (1960), a cat peeks out from under the floorboards.

In his second Surrealist manifesto, André Breton called for the complete occultation of Surrealism. Contributing to this effort, the Surrealist Kurt Seligmann published Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World (1948) and declared, “the magical world is literally that of the artist.” In the mid-20th century, many Surrealists including Varo and others living in exile in Mexico City were already joining hermetic texts, the tarot, and the otherworldly possibilities to their practices of automatism and objective chance. One can see the “literally” Seligmann mentions in Varo’s work, whether that’s a spell she jots in a notebook, a painting’s surface she scratches with a crystal charged with the light of the full moon, or in the way she meticulously deploys decalcomania, a kind of simple printmaking that reveals a doubling of patterns as in Cazadora de Astros (Star Catcher) (1956). Or, brilliantly in Ciencia inútil, o El alquimista (Useless Science, or The Alchemist) (1955) where, like a magician, Varo works with ordinary things of the artist’s world—wooden substrate, paint, solvents—channeling mysterious atmospheres literally created by her skillful transformations.

The exhibition includes a small tarot card Varo painted on bone. A strange little figure holds green threads that emerge from a repeating infinity pattern—or is it a plant tendril or a snake? The figure’s head is shaped like a five-pointed star, a shape that appears again in El juglar (El malabarista) (The Juggler [The Magician]) (1956). Referring to the Major Arcana card of the Magician, Varo depicts a traveling performer whose face—inlaid with mother-of-pearl—shimmers as he looks out at the viewer. The curators describe this material found in mollusks as having the power to channel “creative energies in art.” The Magician tosses starry objects in front of group of twenty-one figures dressed in a “collective cloak.” He is accompanied by familiars: a lion, goat, and owl. On the floor at the Magician’s feet, a small cloth holds an alchemical flask, some roots, and other herbal materials.

Another painting, Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds) (1957) also presents a clearly powerful artist, magician, or alchemist. An extraordinary figure—at once human and birdlike—sits at a worktable drawing or painting with a brush that is connected to a small guitar-like instrument hanging around its neck. The figure is clearly doing more than representing the image of a bird, for the creature springs to life as the artist/scientist trains the light streaming through the window through a prism held in their left hand. The painting distills perfectly Varo’s commitment to the efficacy of art, a practice beyond mere representation that she believed could actually do things in the world.

Magic is at work here. Varo’s occult transmissions from this intense period of less than a decade are powerfully amplified. It is a gorgeous show and the works on view—more than sixty paintings and drawings—cast a spell that is at once a revelation of a whole world of Surrealist chance-based techniques, a deep engagement with spiritual systems of thought, and a long-overdue recognition of Varo’s place as a major contributor to the Surrealist movement.