« Roots, foliage, astral rays, hair, whiskers of a beard, spirals of her: threads of death, threads of life, threads of time. The cloth is woven and unravelled. That which we call life is unreal, that which we call death is unreal, only the canvas is real.” Octavio Paz

The subjects mentioned in the above quotation conjure a vision of a particular kind of world, one where the human condition is re-drawn, where normality is turned on its head, definitions are re-considered and myths revisited. The pictorial vision of Remedios Varo is one from where strange creatures surge forth from burgeoning landscapes and symbolic architecture, all allegorical extensions of the artist; it is through these representations that Varo’s work translates a particular vision of the world in which she herself plays a part.

In this sense, each of Varo’s canvases is an expression of her freedom. In the way of the surrealists, to whom she was very close, the paintings resemble an exploration into another way of existing. The work rarely seems closed or definitive: the representations, although often ambiguous and multi-faceted, can be full of surprises where she plays with rules and conventions through her creation of other worlds or dimensions.  

Varo was born on 16 December, 1908 in Anglés, a small village in the province of Gerona, Catalonia. Her childhood was marked by the dynamism of her father, who stimulated her imagination (it was also her father who initiated her into drawing and mathematics); the fervent spirituality of her mother, who inspired her forays into mysticism; and her grand-mother, an important figure in Varo’s life, who taught her to sew and served as a model for her first sketches.

Her artistic life developed first in Spain, her country of birth and later Paris, France (1908-1941) where she endured a number of upheavals; then in Mexico (1941-1963), where she remained until her death in 1963.

In Spain, surrealism was flourishing in the margins; notably Catalonia and the Canary Islands - Madrid having been suppressed by Franco’s regime. In Catalonia Varo was in contact with painters and poets, themselves seduced by surrealism: painters such as Dali, Miro, Francés, Dominguez and poets like Alberti and Lorca.

After two years of study at the school of Arts and Metiers of Madrid, Varo entered the Academy of Fine Arts San Fernando de Madrid in 1924 which served as a fulcrum to her finding real freedom of expression. Here she was able to immerse herself in a more profound artistic culture, drawn not only from Spanish artists, but also Italians and Dutch, such as Fra Angelico, Giotto, Carpaccio, Vermeer, Bosch, de Hooch, whose work nourished aspects of her own painting.

 

In the 1920s Varo became interested in the surrealist movement, through which she recognised the possibility of escape from the rigid society which marked her earlier education, and which she identified herself with as an art student: in particular the heritage of Spanish painting, Varo was familiar with representations of an altered reality, redrawn by the unique sensibilities of artists such as Bosch or Goya, who she knew well, and from her regular visits to the Musée du Prado.

In 1931, she left for Paris, following the same path as Dali, Bunuel, Lorca, Alberti, Picasso and Miro, who all wanted to go to the source of the surrealist movement, which Varo herself identified with. She spent a year there, and then returned to Barcelona, the Spanish city considered at the time as the most European, where the intellectual life was the most stimulating and promising, and where Varo could make contact with the Catalan avant-gardes, whilst maintaining links with surrealism.

In 1935, Varo made her first surrealist inspired works. These paintings demonstrate the experimental aspect of the surrealist quest, which came to fruition thanks to stream of consciousness writing or the bringing into play of “objective chance”. As the surrealist exploration also comprised this experimental aspect where experiences - hypnotic trances, hallucinatory states, stream of consciousness writing, assembling of random images and collages - were guided by a  preoccupation with the study of existence: they provoked fortuitous meetings of “petrified coincidences” which in turn led to discoveries and revelations of a profound knowledge of “being”, of this “unknown interior”. Varo created her own vision of the world and of art. 

It was as if Varo, at the time, was playing the role that the surrealists had devolved for women, muses, female-children or mediators, whilst always maintaining the margin of artistic creation. Jacqueline Lamba,a companion of André Breton, described Varo during this period of her life as an intelligent woman, creative, but shy. During these formative years she gathered experiences, discovered theories, artistic techniques and nourished herself with diverse influences -Chirico, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy, Magritte, Paalen – a process that would eventually lead to her to creating such unique work.

In July 1940, when the Nazis occupied Paris, Varo fled to the south of France; then at the end of ’42 Varo and Benjamin Péret took refuge in Mexico, as the Cardenas government was offering asylum to all Spanish refugees and to members of the International Brigades.

Once in Mexico, Varo preferred to share creative activities with other artists in exile, like Kati Horna, José Horna, Emerico Weisz, Leonora Carrington, Gunter Gerzso, César Moro, Esteban Francés and Gerardo Lizarraga. She was however close to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and sensitive to the inimitable qualities of Mexican culture and to the ‘magical’ thinking she encountered and the strange mythical world which had evolved there.

To earn a living, she produced publicity and decoration, painted furniture and created publicity images for the pharmaceutical company Bayer. She also designed theatrical decor for the British office for antifascist propaganda, a reflection of her personal desire for political engagement. When Varo designed ballet costumes for a Russian composer, or masks for a work by Calderon entitled Le grand theatre du monde, the experiences precipitated the first steps of her investigations into the nature of ‘being’, the human figure and its representations that Varo would develop in a way that was so rich in her subsequent work.

At the same time, when the artist, in collaboration with the painter Leonora Carrington – sometimes described as her alter ego - wrote texts with esoteric and mystical resonances, she was questioning traditional images of the feminine and her eventual metamorphoses. Varo also discovered the popular imagery of Mexico, the strange representations, fantastical, sometimes violent and disconcerting, bloody or macabre, transforming the powerful and marvellous which is that of nature; as well as the tormented figuresfrom geography, but also from the history of Mexico. However, this facet of Mexican culture would not be reflected in her pictorial creations. Moreover, some of her paintings during the ‘40s, notably The scorpions, have a markedly cubist character, demonstrating the diverse influences that continued to haunt her before she was led down a deeply personal creative path.

In ’49 she married the poet Walter Gruen.Due to the financial and emotional support he gave her, she was able to abandon her commercial activities in order to concentrate solely on her own work. She painted, consecrating many hours toworking in her home at rue Alvaro Obregon or on the terrace there, which was flooded with the intense Mexican light. Varo, during these years, created the essence of her pictorial work, devising strange and profoundly original paintings, in relation to the influences previouslyevoked.Indeed, Varo’s paintings seem hybrid in nature, mid-way between literature and painting.

Leonardo da Vinci said that « painting is a poetry that one sees ». Remedios Varo appears to construct her paintings like a poet or a novelist constructs his/her texts. Further, what is striking about her work is its narrative aspect, the impression of continuity between the different pictures, of a chronology. Time flows into one painting from another; Varo inscribes a duration, a temporality between the canvases, sometimes even within one painting, where the being is represented in a stratum time which forms part of it, and not in the fixation of an instant, as with some photographs.

 

This passing, this weight of time, is linked, as in a novel, to a narrative, through a point of view and through recurring characters that populate Varo’s universe: the lodger with the face of a doll, the woman-bird, the bearded man, the gnome, the spinster…. These characters, placed in diverse situations, illuminated with distinctive perspectives, are the constitutive elements of a story, of a fiction which resembles a tale, a story of apprenticeship, an initiatory and ontological quest. The titles of the paintings suggest a progression of being which reflects Varo’s pursuit for self knowledge. The spaces created by her on the canvas refer to a symbolic universe, both playful and light, grave and profound.

Varo exhibited for the first time in Mexico in 1955. The following year her first solo exhibition was organised. Her paintings were received with lively enthusiasm, more from the public than the critics. It was a success that finally allowed Remedios to earn a living from her painting. However, she was an anxious person, extremely afraid of illness and ageing. She would complain that her success was another source of stress for her, and would regularly say that when she was in her sixties she would like to withdraw from public life and finish her days in a Carmelite monastery near to Cordoba, founded by one of her ancestors. This was nothing but a fantasy, as it is highly unlikely that an artist like Varo would have been welcome with open arms. We will never know, on 8 October 1963, she died unexpectedly of a heart attack age 54. Her last painting Still Life Resuscitating is the only work she created without any characters. In 1964 a retrospective was held at the Museum of Fine Art in Mexico which attracted more than 50,000 visitors.

 

Varo was part of a significant movement marking the emergence, with its beginnings in 1940s Spain and Latin America, of a feminine expression, which until then had been rarely acknowledged. Women, so often players on a stage or a page written by male authors, were appearing more and more as creators, notably in the area of fine arts.  Varo’s artistic life forms part of the emergence of new islands, or an entire continent, on a map where until then only the expression of male thought had figured.