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Excerpts From A Thesis By Carlota Caulfield Mills College It is impossible to see or read the works of the Spanish surrealist
painter-writer Remedios Varo (1913-1963) without reflecting on the words
that Andre Breton wrote in his first Surrealist Manifesto: It is a special, strange, unique beauty, in which things acquire a new dimension,and its own form of being from that which discovers, them. The surrealists believed that any object, no matter how common-place it might be, could become a marvelous object. One can never see the object in itself; it is always illuminated by the imaginative eye that contemplates it. The essence of humor is that adjustment between divergent realities. The unusual, can terrify and fascinate like Dali, or it can provoke laughter and illuminate, like Magritte and Varo. Among the surrealist "amusements" and marvelous objects that inhabit
her paintings, the umbrella,is an object with a symbolic function. Born
of the sticks' rebellion against oblivion, it is often repeated in her
paintings, as an accomplice of those human beings who wish to escape a
"petrified" destiny.
Varo shows one of the young weavers,who has rebelled against the uniformity of her world and her embroidering. As the artist herself described it: "it is a subterfuge in which we see her with her loved one, with whom she has succeeded in fleeing. They leave in a spatial vehicle across a desert, towards a cave." The "spatial vehicle," is an inverted umbrella, a winged boat whose rudder resembles a stick.The umbrella, in addition to being an accomplice of universal rebellion, is also an accomplice of love. Love is one of the paths, which for the surrealists, was also a bridge to another world. The people in Varo's paintings are seeking a spiritual dimension, similar to the spirituality the artist herself sought during her life. Varo studied different mystical disciplines metaphysical texts. Her unpublished notebooks contain Arabic names and Islamic references. Varo explored the ideas of Gurdjieff,Blavatsky, Eckhart, Ouspensky, The Sufies, Freud and Jung. Medieval Alchemy, sacred geometry. the legends of the Holy Grail,and the I Ching, Gregorian chants, the paintings of Hyeronimous Bosch, and the novels of Hermann Hesse, were all vehicles of spiritual growth for the painter and her work. What is apparently absurd in Varo's paintings (umbrellas transformed into wings, boats and weathervanes; wheels that replace legs) are the symbols of a new dimension in which imagination and spirit set free assure that the marvelous is always beautiful. In 1959 Remedios Varo "embarked on a series of pseudoscholarly reinterpretations of the various branches of science". Varo wanted to bring science into closer harmony with magic and myth. Varo left some of her "scientific-humorous-writings" unfinished at her death.
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