The remarkable creativity evidenced in the work of Remedios Varo stand as some of the most significant contributions to the story of Surrealism. The complex matrix of influences that serve as the foundational architecture and iconography for her paintings—from medieval history and Greek mythology to scientific reason and alchemy, nature, music, and pagan practices—is uniquely her own. While Varo’s reality is abundant with fantasia, she presents her pictorial universe with a scientific sensibility: a methodical explanation of the mystical.

Executed in 1956, Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente) is a canonical example of Varo’s complex visual lexicon. Her “animistic faith in the power of objects and in the interrelatedness of plant, animal, human, and mechanical worlds“ is hereby poetically displayed. The result is a visual tale of Homeric-like intricacy (W. Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, New York, 1985, p. 202). An artist who was conscious of craft and technique, there is a compulsive attention to detail visible here as it is throughout her oeuvre; each brushstroke transmitting a clear purpose. In essence, Varo’s are paintings built from details: mimicking the principles of scientific illustration, the technical precision of Armonía harkens the illustrations she produced while a scientific expedition to the Orinoco River in Venezuela a decade prior. More, Varo’s technical prowess imbue her works with a hallucinatory feel and “while we often see everything in [her paintings], we leave the encounter feeling that we have missed a crucial key that would reveal with claritys the meaning to us” (ibid., p. 169). Janet A. Kaplan, the late art historian and chronicler of Varo’s life, points to the sophistication of Varo’s visual hybridization of influential historical and literary sources in Armonía. Likening the painting to Renaissance depictions of saints in their studies, specifically to Saint Jermone in His Study by Antonelloa de Messina (see fig 1.) Kaplan comments: “in each, a solitary figure absorbed in spiritual work sits in a self-contained space of heavy walls, arched doorways and ceilings, clerestory windows, and rich parquetry floors. And in each, there is painstaking attention to detail [;] for both Varo and Antonello this attention to detail derived from similar sources—early Netherlandish style of encyclopedic inventory found in Flemish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” (J. A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo, Unexpected Journeys, New York, 2000, p. 194).

Suggestive of Varo’s own spiritual quest and autobiographical journeys, she increasingly filled her pictorial universe "with fantastical adventures of enlightenment, spiritual purification” and order (ibid., p. 177). In later works like Hacia la torre, the current global auction record sold in these rooms in 2014, these narratives were more allegorical and biographical; in the instance of Armonía, she relies upon the structural principles of music, which served as a significant symbol of organization in modeling her pictorial stories: “music [for Varo] is a deliberately patterned construction, and so [it] appears as an agent for organizing life in several of [her] images of creation” (A. Friedman, “The Serenity of Science” in Remedios Varo: Catálogo Razonado, Cuartera Edición, Mexico City, 2008, pp. 83-84). A meditative, peaceful energy surrounds the lone figure (Varo herself) while a strange, supernatural chaos takes place around her –floorboards open to release floating sheets of paper, cabinet drawers fling open to reveal various natural ephemera, birds attempt escape yet are confused by tromp l’oeil tricks, ghostly beings appear from the walls. While “confusion reigns in this monastic room, we sense that it is only a matter of t.mes until a [harmonic order] reigns” (W. Chadwick, op. cit., New York, 1985, p. 203).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York: Remedios Varo, Artist Profile

National Museum of Women in the Arts: Remedios Varo, Artist Profile

Voices of Mexico Feature: Remedios Varo