The uncanny and magic universe of Remedios Varo, through a single painting
After a beautiful visit last month in Washington DC, Connecticut Washington Printmakers Gallery artist member Matina Marki Tillman shares thoughts about one piece of artwork, part of the exhibition that she and gallery president Marie B-Cilia De Amicis viewed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA).
“Uncanny” (a psychology term for the experience of “something familiar, yet alien”), was a major multimedia, multi-participant show recently on display at NMWA, powerfully curated by Orin Zahra. It set a disquieting experience for the viewers and prompted them to have a second glance at womanhood, stereotypes, and concepts, through the often strange and unsettling women artists “lens.” The piece that immediately engaged the small group was an oil painting, “Phenomenon of Weightlessness” by Remedios Varo. An astronomer is losing his (physical and scientific) balance within the space he originally thought was ordered and neatly set in his laboratory shelves. Dimensional planes are distorted, and conjured new ones revealed, as he is not stepping any more securely in any. Created in 1963, this painting echoes the collision of well-ordered Newtonian physics and Einstein’s revolutionary theory of relativity. Most of all it urges the interconnectedness of the universe and the ever-changing nature of science, in the oneiric way of Varo.
Remedios Varo (1908 – 1963), Spanish born, was classically trained as an artist in Madrid and was influenced in her technical drawings by her engineer father. In 1937 she moved to Paris, introduced to the Surrealist movement, and finally expatriated to Mexico in 1941, fleeing the Nazi occupation. Joined there by Carrington (another “Uncanny” participant), with whom she forged a female alliance and a long friendship, she evolved her own artistic style (“I don’t belong to any group,” she stated in an interview in 1957). Varo was an intuitive seeker of her placement in the Cosmos, a conscious feminist that strove to part from patriarchal movements, and an interpreter of alchemy and science as well as spiritual worlds and the occult. She has created a magical, figurative, and abstract universe through techniques that can amaze any artist; even more, the always technique-seeking printmakers (cartoon transfer, decalcomania, grattage, and many more).
“Phenomenon of Weightlessness” by Remedios Varo, 1963. Photo: M. Tillman