Play reigns in Leonora Carrington’s universe, imposing its rules that aim at the increase of pleasure and at its continuous renewal. It is this play—one of the most dangerous—that has allowed her to enter the subterranean world where, she says, one can enter and exit at will. Is it therefore this ambition that gives her paintings their very considerable character of intrigue and exorcism?
The painting of Leonora Carrington unveils a mysterious and intoxicatingly charming universe where fantastical hybrid characters and luminous deities enact complex yet impenetrable rituals. One of many Surrealists to make an exodus to Mexico in the wake of the Second World War, Carrington was deeply taken upon her arrival there in 1943 with the diverse magical and syncretic Catholic traditions of the local people; the harmony of indigenous Aztec, Mayan and more modern Western traditions resonated with the artist, whose fascination with the occult began with Irish myths her grandmother taught her as a young girl.
Executed in 1957 during a period of furious productivity and study, The Garden of Paracelsus is a paragon of Carrington’s technical abilities and plastic imagination. Here, four incandescent pairs of diaMetricas lly matched light and dark figures engage in mystical dances around a central egg as glowing mythical guardian creatures look on. In the background plumes of scarlet, fawn and soft ecru swirl in a volcanic symphony, rendered masterfully in the Surrealist éclaboussure technique for which Carrington and her close friend Remedios Varo were both renowned - in which pigment is splattered across the surface then gently soaked up, revealing constellations of tiny dots and soft color in patterns determined by chance. Piercing diagonals divide the composition into further constellations and alchemical symbols that advance and recede; an upward-pointing triangle, “the ancient symbol for the three-fold nature of the goddess and the three stages of womanhood: maiden, mother and crone” (Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, Burlington & Hampshire, 2004, p. 94), with a twinkling unicorn at its pinnacle casts a protective shadow across the painting’s protagonists.
The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between Great and Small, which makes it impossible to see everything at once.
The central figure at the heart of The Garden of Paracelsus is a radiant egg, borne aloft by a figure robed in white. In the title here, Carrington references Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss physician, alchemist, theologian and philosopher who advanced the scientific study of medicine and wrote dense clairvoyant texts with lasting cultural impact. He used the egg as a metaphor for the composition of the universe, claiming that the earth and water make up the globe, or yolk of the egg, which is encased in fire and air (like a shell). The egg is a critical symbol throughout Carrington’s oeuvre for its many layered resonances; it bears the fear, joy and unknowability of forthcoming new life, and visually recalls the alembic, the round vessel used in alchemy. In Down Below, Carrington’s memoir of her confinement in a Spanish asylum in 1941 following the imprisonment of her lover Max Ernst in Nazi-occupied France, she is haunted by visions of an egg, which she views as a kind of clairvoyant crystal. Resisting a specific narrative reading but clearly recalling Paracelsus’ hermetic writings, Carrington here places the egg at the center of the ritual, but also in the upper register cradled by a bird figure (Ernst’s avatar of himself), and echoed in form by the lustrous heads carried gingerly by the headless figures in the lower right. These spritely characters recall Carrington’s 1939 portrait of Max Ernst in which Carrington depicts her former lover carrying her avatar, the horse, encased in an egg-like crystal lantern. Here the two headless figures intertwine in a delicate dance; harmonious balances reign as dark and light entangle freely, perhaps offering a hopeful reclamation of the earlier image. Carrington’s crystalline orbs resist direct interpretation but seem to offer a vision of incipient possibility and universal harmony.
Works by Leonora Carrington in Major Institutional collects ions
All Leonora Carrington’s art is a gay, diabolical and persistent struggle against orthodoxy, which Leonora conquers and disperses with imagination, always multiple and singular, an imagination which she communicates with loving pride.
In The Garden of Paracelsus, Carrington offers a glimpse into her dense visual universe; her diverse matrix of influences, ranging from medieval history and Greek mythology to scientific experimentation, alchemy, nature, music and pagan practices, are in resplendent display. This universe offers a galaxy of infinite potential where “life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else; a world set free, brimming with possibilities.” (Cecilia Alemani, https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2022/stat.mes nt-cecilia-alemani). This year, Carrington’s expansive vision of the universe serves as the conceptual basis for The Milk of Dreams, the central exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale. Through the lens of Carrington’s cosmos of infinite metamorphosis, curator Cecilia Alemani examines how artists of the last century have explored critical questions around the human condition in the wake of pandemic, environmental disaster and technological revolution. Carrington’s phantasmic paintings dovetail with elastic visions of the future presented by her contemporaries like Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini, but also by contemporary artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Katharina Fritsch and Simone Leigh. At once futuristic and reflexive, Carrington’s astounding world stands as one of the most significant artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
