In Remedios Varo’s Los caminos tortuosos, a bicycle-bodied woman enrobed in a fiery cape spins forth from a shadowy doorway. Gossamer flies' wings and propellers affixed to her hat and umbrella stand ready to flutter away, and bear her aloft into the dark, starry galaxies that bathe the upper right. Hidden just around the corner of the doorway, a man in a dark hat and cloak gazes back at her, as a fine tendril of his mustache wraps ominously around her arm. A glittering display of Varo’s exacting technical abilities, the narrative at the center of Los caminos tortuosos touches on many of the key motifs that run through Varo’s celebrated oeuvre, from gender dynamics to scientific innovation.
Much of Varo’s mature painting makes oblique reference to her life story, though often draped in layers of allegory and ambivalence. Born into a middle-class Spanish family in 1908, Varo’s strict Catholic upbringing led her to early acts of rebellion, spurred by trips to the Prado with her engineer father. She first encountered the Surrealist group while studying at Madrid’s prestigious Academia de San Fernando. Taken with their search for liberated consciousness, love for the occult and bohemian lifestyle, she fell in with the group and quickly married the painter Gerardo Lizarraga, and in the wake of the Spanish Civil War followed him to Paris. Throughout the European years, Varo’s contributions to her artistic circles were frequently undermined by male colleagues, even her own romantic partners. Resourceful, curious and driven, Varo was often the breadwinner in her relationships, sidelining her own artistic pursuits to support a series of artist partners. Her arrival in Mexico following World War II marked a period of greater financial stability, and the work she took up there—from advertising and the design of theatrical sets to scientific documentation for a voyage into the Orinoco rainforest—fueled the precise technique and rich catalogue of imagery that populate works like Los caminos tortuosos.
Although many of the characters in Varo’s paintings are androgynous… she was careful to delineate the female anatomy of her heroines. Thus transferring power across gender lines and conferring heroic authority on women, Varo sets her work in opposition to circumscribed limits to women’s sphere articulated by orthodox surrealist theory.
Varo often prefers to leave her narratives ambiguous; conflicts are unresolved, and as in life, the characters’ motivations are often unclear. Images of travelers recur throughout Varo's work; Astro errante of 1961 depicts a similarly-cloaked character voyaging through a nebula-flecked sky (see fig. 1). Somet.mes s they are imbued with supernatural powers, or are outfitted with outlandish scientific instruments as in Exploring the Source of the Orinoco River of 1963 (see fig. 2)—like the propeller-hat and umbrella wielded in the present work. Shown in tandem with nature's own propellers (wings), there is at once something humorous about them, a gentle poke at human's bumbling attempts to improve on the natural world; yet they also earnestly underline the heroine's dogged intent to take flight.
In Los caminos tortuosos, the flat, anonymous architecture, dark palette and sly expression of the male character set an ominous tone, but his threatening tendrils hang loosely away from her left arm. Though our heroine gazes back with a sharp look, her right arm is held out firmly, ready to open her umbrella and take flight, and the paved path, the "torturous road," lies ahead. Supported by wings of her own invention, our hybrid heroine is poised to escape by any means necessary into the unknown.
