The astounding and intricate visual world created by Remedios Varo stands as one of the most important contributions to the international story of Surrealism. Born into a middle-class Spanish family in 1908, Varo’s claustrophobically strict Catholic upbringing led her to early acts of rebellion. Fascinated by mystical and monastic practices, she collects ed plants believed to have magical properties, and her interest in the fanciful was further spurred by trips to the Prado with her architect father, where she internalized the painting of the masters of the Northern Renaissance. Later while studying at Madrid’s prestigious Academia de San Fernando, she first read Surrealist publications.

With their search for liberated consciousness and a love for the occult, Surrealism offered the bohemian lifestyle and freedom Varo longed for. Her entanglement with the group, however, paralleled a life spent in exile—driven first to Paris by the Spanish Civil War, and later to Mexico City by World War II. In her mature paintings, Varo’s biography is always present, yet only obliquely. A prolific lifelong student, her personal iconography is founded in a complex matrix of influences, ranging from medieval history and Greek mythology to scientific experimentation, alchemy, nature, music and pagan practices. In Esquiador, an inventive tour-de-force of technical skill set in the heart of a dark forest, she offers us a glimpse at an otherworldly cabal of explorers.

In Esquiador a veiled figure in a silver fur coat with a gleaming clear orb at its chest stands in rakish repose; one hand is tucked in its pocket, the other rests possessively on the head of a feathered companion. At either side the figure is guarded by a pair of amber-eyed, downy owls, whose plush plumage cascades to a set of tiny, gleaming claws. Atop the figure’s hooded eyes, a minuscule portal opens, from which a tiny, inverted face peers out from a pointed cap. All of this unfolds at the center of a nutshell-like vehicle, propelled forth by a single ribbon-esque ski through a dark wintry forest, as frothy clouds of snow swirl around. Painted with the Surrealist decalomania technique she perfected, in which dots of paint are scattered and blown across the panel to create a diaphanous frost across the surface, the blustery waves of snow cast an air of silent mystery.

Varo’s luscious, tactile rendering of the fur coat and feathers recalls the work of Albrecht Dürer (see fig. 1). Like Dürer, Varo’s work is grounded in a scientific sensibility and close observation of the natural world; even at its most fantastical, there is a compulsive attention to detail and realistic rendering of organic elements. The image also closely recalls a drawing by Bosch, The Woods Have Ears, The Fields Have Eyes, in which a stormy-eyed owl perches in a gnarled, ancient tree at the heart of a forest; all around, ears stand at attention among the trees, and eyes dot the forest floor (see fig. 2). The work bears a Latin inscription which reads, “It is characteristic of the most dismal of intelligences always to use clichés and never their own inventions.” Often read as a warning to himself to maintain originality, Bosch’s inscription here echoes across Varo’s profoundly inventive and technically brilliant oeuvre.

Explorers figure prominently through Varo’s body of work, echoing the Homeric and Medieval texts she fervently studied, as well as her own story. Around 1950, Varo and a lover traveled with a team of scientists to the rainforest surrounding the Orinoco River in Venezuela, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. To finance the trip, Varo took a job with the Department of Public Health, making drawings of microscopic enlargements of insects. Though the imagery in Esquiador is distinctly wintry and European, the idea of encountering unexplainable mysteries and fantastical creatures deep in the woods certainly echoes this experience. The cast of characters here are distinctly ambivalent. The figure’s hooded gaze and empty chest seem sinister, and the flying inverted face above evokes the Hanged Man of the Tarot—yet the owl companions’ placid expressions and the ethereal beauty of their surroundings assert a calm over the image. Across cultures, owls are imbued with diverse symbolism. In Western classical tradition, their association with the Greek goddess Athena invokes wisdom and intelligence; however in myths from indigenous cultures across the Americas, they are often harbings ers of death, or messengers from the afterlife. Deep in the woods, Varo brings us to the liminal space between society and wilderness—or perhaps even between this world and the next.