My Favorite Artist #5: Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo, www.vientosur.info

Welcome to the fifth installment of My Favorite Artists. This time, I will introduce you to the otherworldly subjects and stunning technique of Remedios Varo, friend to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.  Although lumped in with the Surrealist movement, Varo transcended its reliance on illogical and juxtaposed objects to create a realm beyond reality.  Although she depicts scenes of gorgeous unreality, they are always grounded by an understory of very human experiences and emotions.  We can relate to her women on the verge of momentous discovery, whether threatened, tethered or creating.  

Useless Science, or The Alchemist, Remedios Varo, 1955, oil on Masonite, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

Varo (1908-1963) was born in Spain, learned drawing from her father and trained as a painter.  In the 1930s, she moved from Madrid to Barcelona and then Paris, where she met Surrealist artists, like Esteban Frances, Oscar Dominguez and Marcel Jean, along with radical thinkers.  

Creation of the Birds, Remedios Varo, 1957, oil on Masonite, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

Varo moved to Mexico in 1941 to escape Fascism in Spain and France.  She reinvented her art amongst a community of expatriate intellectuals and artists, including Leonora Carrington, who would become a close friend.  Her early work after crossing the Atlantic dealt with the horrors of war and its associated traumas.  In the late 1940s, her artwork was at its zenith, showcasing her famous female subjects in action or stasis.  The luminosity and glow of her gorgeous technique have been compared to that of a medieval illuminated manuscript artist, consumed by the meticulous detail and hues that will lead the viewer through the substance. Symbolism, double meanings and ethereal imagery abound.

In Useless Science, or The Alchemist, a seated woman, literally wearing the tiled floor, is bound to her domestic existance as she uses a fantastic apparatus consisting of a cranking mechanism attached to a maze of pipes and gears in towers capped by bells and sirens. Whatever she may be grinding seems inadequate to justify a life beyond her stultifying mechanical prison. The product of her efforts may be alchemical in nature, but is it magical enough to empower her to move.

In Creation of the Birds, a bird-woman creates living birds that fly off of her paper, produced through her brush and the alchemically charged light of a star piercing a magnifying glass, along with a palette fueled by the cosmos. In her God-like creator role, she watches birds fly free through the windows as she herself remains tethered by her role as governess of natural things.

Celestial Pablum (Star Maker) is a poignant and powerful commentary on the complexities of motherhood, with a star standing in for a real baby. The woman grinds stardust into powder to feed her luminous lunar child. Perhaps a self-portrait, she ruminates on the ages-old dilemna of being a mother and doing what you are meant to do.

Celestial Pablum (Star Maker), Remedios Varo, 1958, oil on Masonite, Gallery Wendi Norris

Varo’s legacy of more than five hundred works of art stands as a testimony to her own alchemical abilities, taking paint and turning it into, not a dream, but a hyper-reality, so true we are stunned by its honesty.  As Varo herself said, “The dream world and the real world are the same.”  Her acute observation of the world around her manifested in the strokes of her paintbrush.  The famous poet, Octavio Paz, indicated Varo “...Painted with her eyes rather than with her hands…she sweeps the canvas clean and heaps up clarities on its transparent surface.”