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Lot Essay
A woman’s hair…the strings of a harp…the sun’s rays streaming down…the strings of a guitar. The world seen as music: listen to Remedios’s lines. Octavio Paz
“Always alert, she lived in perpetual exploration of clues, of revelations, expanding her intelligence and her intuition to understand the hidden meanings of being and life,” recalled Varo’s friend, the critic and philosopher Juliana González. “She saw in everything the life latent within” (in J. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 1988, pp. 7-8). That sense of wonder and reverence toward the cosmic world shaped Varo’s trajectory from her beginnings among the avant-garde in Barcelona through her emergence as a creative force within the Surrealist circle in Paris. She fled Europe at the end of 1941, following the German occupation of France, and like fellow expatriates Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon she became enamored with the land that André Breton once called “the Surrealist place, par excellence.” Varo supported herself with a variety of commercial work during her first decade in Mexico, notably by making illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer; not until her marriage to the Austrian émigré Walter Gruen, in 1952, did she have the wherewithal to devote herself fully to painting. The works that she made beginning in the mid-1950s—among them Energía cósmica and Creación con rayos astrales (1955)—mark the pinnacle of her career and manifest the surreal and speculative imagination for which she is renowned.
“Surveying the line between free will and determinism, Varo felt that all humanity was ‘bound by a cosmic, mysterious destiny,’ by an interconnectedness that she saw as the magic underlying existence,” notes art historian Janet Kaplan. “It was a magic she believed in as life’s motive force” (J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 181). The synergies of music, nature, and magic percolate through her mature painting, informed both by her study of the mystic George I. Gurdjieff, who understood the musical scale as a model of the universe, and by an abiding interest in the physical sciences that traced back to her father, a hydraulic engineer. “According to Gurdjieff’s law of octaves, described by P. D. Ouspensky, the universe, like music, is made up of vibrations, and because of this, musical structures can elucidate phenomena that might otherwise be incomprehensible,” explains curator Claire Howard. “Both sunlight and music are products of vibrations, as contemporary images of the solar spectrum captured by rockets would have reminded Varo” (Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2023, pp. 48-9).
We do not find ourselves here simply in front of the work of a painter; but in front of the creation of a world: a total world, a coherent world, a secret world. Jomí García Ascot
The vibrations that resound across Energía cósmica invisibly connect a surreal universe in microcosm: two shallow, shadowy figures materialize against the withered walls of a room, one stroking a sagacious orange cat—Varo’s chosen alter-ego—and the other drawing a bow across a violin. Their flattened silhouettes literally take shape within the enchanted interior space, their right arms suggestively animated by subliminal consonances of light and sound. Light beams into this strangely overgrown, perspectival space through cylindrical cut-outs in each wall, its striated rays—“as in spectroscopic images” and as seen in the earlier Música solar (1955)—illuminating the delicate white flowers that grow on grass-covered floorboards. “Energía cósmica represents a continuation of Varo’s investigations in Música solar,” Howard continues. “The painting’s original and current titles, Inspiración and Energía cósmica, echo the interplay of creation and the cosmos central to both it and Música solar and the spiritual and scientific sources on which Varo drew in painting them. By invoking recent scientific verification of the invisible as real, her paintings suggest the constructive powers of other invisible forces, including those reached through the cultivation of higher consciousness or the Surrealist delving into the unconscious, and the validity—and even greater truthfulness—of such phenomena as subject matter for art” (C. Howard, op. cit., p. 50).
“She had an exceptional love for all that could be experienced through the senses: her touch passed and repassed over the warm surface of wood or the coolness and solidity of a rock,” Juliana González recounted. “And her greatest reverence was shown before plants, flowers, trees, animals: in the most unexpected corners of her house an ivy flourished or a vegetable was germinating” (in J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 8). In Energía cósmica, Varo invites us into an animist world alight with a musical cosmology of her own invention, its subjects highly attuned to the phenomenal world around them. “Space is not an expanse but a magnet attracting Appearances,” wrote the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz in a moving tribute to Varo. “A woman’s hair…the strings of a harp…the sun’s rays streaming down…the strings of a guitar. The world seen as music: listen to Remedios’s lines” (“Remedios Varo’s Appearances and Disappearances,” 1966, in J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 231).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Always alert, she lived in perpetual exploration of clues, of revelations, expanding her intelligence and her intuition to understand the hidden meanings of being and life,” recalled Varo’s friend, the critic and philosopher Juliana González. “She saw in everything the life latent within” (in J. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 1988, pp. 7-8). That sense of wonder and reverence toward the cosmic world shaped Varo’s trajectory from her beginnings among the avant-garde in Barcelona through her emergence as a creative force within the Surrealist circle in Paris. She fled Europe at the end of 1941, following the German occupation of France, and like fellow expatriates Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon she became enamored with the land that André Breton once called “the Surrealist place, par excellence.” Varo supported herself with a variety of commercial work during her first decade in Mexico, notably by making illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer; not until her marriage to the Austrian émigré Walter Gruen, in 1952, did she have the wherewithal to devote herself fully to painting. The works that she made beginning in the mid-1950s—among them Energía cósmica and Creación con rayos astrales (1955)—mark the pinnacle of her career and manifest the surreal and speculative imagination for which she is renowned.
“Surveying the line between free will and determinism, Varo felt that all humanity was ‘bound by a cosmic, mysterious destiny,’ by an interconnectedness that she saw as the magic underlying existence,” notes art historian Janet Kaplan. “It was a magic she believed in as life’s motive force” (J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 181). The synergies of music, nature, and magic percolate through her mature painting, informed both by her study of the mystic George I. Gurdjieff, who understood the musical scale as a model of the universe, and by an abiding interest in the physical sciences that traced back to her father, a hydraulic engineer. “According to Gurdjieff’s law of octaves, described by P. D. Ouspensky, the universe, like music, is made up of vibrations, and because of this, musical structures can elucidate phenomena that might otherwise be incomprehensible,” explains curator Claire Howard. “Both sunlight and music are products of vibrations, as contemporary images of the solar spectrum captured by rockets would have reminded Varo” (Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2023, pp. 48-9).
We do not find ourselves here simply in front of the work of a painter; but in front of the creation of a world: a total world, a coherent world, a secret world. Jomí García Ascot
The vibrations that resound across Energía cósmica invisibly connect a surreal universe in microcosm: two shallow, shadowy figures materialize against the withered walls of a room, one stroking a sagacious orange cat—Varo’s chosen alter-ego—and the other drawing a bow across a violin. Their flattened silhouettes literally take shape within the enchanted interior space, their right arms suggestively animated by subliminal consonances of light and sound. Light beams into this strangely overgrown, perspectival space through cylindrical cut-outs in each wall, its striated rays—“as in spectroscopic images” and as seen in the earlier Música solar (1955)—illuminating the delicate white flowers that grow on grass-covered floorboards. “Energía cósmica represents a continuation of Varo’s investigations in Música solar,” Howard continues. “The painting’s original and current titles, Inspiración and Energía cósmica, echo the interplay of creation and the cosmos central to both it and Música solar and the spiritual and scientific sources on which Varo drew in painting them. By invoking recent scientific verification of the invisible as real, her paintings suggest the constructive powers of other invisible forces, including those reached through the cultivation of higher consciousness or the Surrealist delving into the unconscious, and the validity—and even greater truthfulness—of such phenomena as subject matter for art” (C. Howard, op. cit., p. 50).
“She had an exceptional love for all that could be experienced through the senses: her touch passed and repassed over the warm surface of wood or the coolness and solidity of a rock,” Juliana González recounted. “And her greatest reverence was shown before plants, flowers, trees, animals: in the most unexpected corners of her house an ivy flourished or a vegetable was germinating” (in J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 8). In Energía cósmica, Varo invites us into an animist world alight with a musical cosmology of her own invention, its subjects highly attuned to the phenomenal world around them. “Space is not an expanse but a magnet attracting Appearances,” wrote the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz in a moving tribute to Varo. “A woman’s hair…the strings of a harp…the sun’s rays streaming down…the strings of a guitar. The world seen as music: listen to Remedios’s lines” (“Remedios Varo’s Appearances and Disappearances,” 1966, in J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 231).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park