Varo, born in 1908, discovered surrealism in art school in Madrid, where she refined her impressive technical skills. They connected banal day-to-day order with Nazism the tedium of trains running on time was inseparable from the logical, efficient organization that mobilized the German troops and produced death camps. Rejecting the Catholic church, they substituted what French poet Andre Breton called the “marvelous,” a magical “absolute reality” that transcended everyday life. The surrealists were not aesthetes: they participated in the Spanish civil war, the French resistance, and the international meetings of the communist party. Varo’s fantastically detailed dioramas do not exclude the real world–they reveal its inverse, investigating the repressed forces that determine our so-called rational decisions. The surrealists’ exaltation of the unconscious, of dreams and the irrational, was not a regressive or even ironic rejection of a stable world but an utterly reasonable critique of a world gone mad. For the surrealists, the rationality on which Western civilization was based–long viewed as instrumental in safeguarding order–was responsible for the anguish and destruction produced by World War I.
She was a surrealist, a full member of an anarchic Camelot that called for systematic revolution against the chaos produced by such institutions as government and religion. Remedios Varo lived during interesting times among interesting people.
There are odd conveyances: gazebos on wheels and little boats like soupspoons with buttons and paddle wheels. Walls dissolve into ruffles a woman spoon-feeds the moon. Her works are an arcane catalog of stairways, hallways, towers, and moats. This summer the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum hosts a traveling retrospective, curated in Mexico, of captivating, subversive work by an important 20th-century woman artist, “The Magic of Remedios Varo.” Each of the 77 detailed, meticulous paintings and drawings on display offers a window on the Catalan-born Varo’s complicated vision of an occult world.
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