Remedios Varo - an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.

Remedios Varo, Letters, Dreams & Other Writings, Trans. byMargaret Carson, Wakefield Press, 2018.
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While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908-63) the surrealist painter is now well established, Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. Her writings, which were never published during her life let alone translated into English, present something of a missing chapter and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.
                    This volume brings together the painter's collected writings and includes an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in surrealist automatic writing and prose poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific, De Homo Rodans, an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Ostensibly written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, Varo's text utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.


“I sometimes write,” the Spanish artist Remedios Varo once said, “as if I were making a sketch.” A sketch, perhaps, in the sense that Varo kept her writings in school composition books and didn’t intend to show them to the public, but it’s impossible to think of her meticulously crafted texts—including, in addition to these letters, fable-like tales, comical recipes, dream journals, and a pseudo-scientific spoof—as mere sketches. Born in Anglès, Spain in 1908, Varo graduated from the prestigious Academia de San Fernando art school in Madrid in 1930 and began to move in avant-garde circles in Barcelona. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, she headed to Paris with her then-partner, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, and a few years later, with the onset of the Second World War and the German occupation of Paris, moved again as a refugee to Mexico City, where she remained until her death in 1963. She was a close friend and neighbor of the artist Leonora Carrington, with whom she shared a lively interest in witchcraft, alchemy, and the occult, as can be seen in the following letters, published here for the first time in English translation. Reading them, admirers of Remedios Varo will be delighted to discover her captivating, subversive voice, the verbal equivalent to the inventive wit that imbues her singular paintings.—Margaret Carson
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/three-letters/


A new book gathers the private writings of Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo (1908-63). The Mexico-resident artist has gained a supportive following for her paintings and this book brings her writings to new foreign audiences. The publisher is Wakefield Press, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a specialist publishing house producing literary texts in translation, including some rarities of Surrealism. This small-format paperback edition is attractive and comfortable in the hands, with a few transcriptions of text and images. It is the first English translation of the Spanish language edition published in Mexico in 1994.
The artist was born in Anglès, Girona. She studied in the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, graduating in 1930, just a few years after the golden generation of Dalí, Lorca and Buñuel. In the mid-1930s Varo became engaged by the art and ideas of the Surrealist movement. She was friendly with Óscar Dominguez and had a relationship with Esteban Francés, both Spanish Surrealist painters. In 1937, concerned about the Spanish Civil War and the progress of the Falangists, Varo left her homeland and moved to Paris to join the Surrealists officially. Her art was published in journals and she exhibited at a number of major displays of Surrealist art.
In 1941 Varo fled Europe for Mexico, where she would spend the rest of her life. During her time in Mexico City she became close to Leonora Carrington. Varo’s painting and literary fantasies share much with Carrington. Although they came from different backgrounds, their outlooks largely converged and found common ground in Surrealism, fantasy, dreams, allegories and fables. Carrington appears in some of Varo’s recorded dreams and Varo is a character (Carmella Velasquez) in Carrington’s novella The Hearing Trumpet.
The texts in this collection seem to have been private writings not intended for publication. Some were found in Varo’s daily notebooks, surrounded with mundane lists and calculations, and published posthumously. There are letters to identified or unidentified recipients, logs of dreams and unpublished written interviews. Few are dated; the translator suggests that they were written in the last years of the artist’s life. Varo’s papers and art were preserved and promoted by her last partner, Walter Gruen, whose efforts have contributed to Varo’s sustained reputation. The translator’s introduction will help newcomers to Varo’s art and writing; notes identify some individuals mentioned in the texts.
Varo’s writing is full of playful wit. She sends ciphers to a painter colleague and reminds him of shared paellas past. In a letter to a stranger picked at random, she invites him to spend New Year’s Eve at another random stranger’s house. The amusing and disarmingly self-deprecating letter recalls the acts of arbitrary mischief that Surrealists advocated; the combination of precision, pointlessness and whimsicality has charm. In other letters she comments to supporters about her art.
One of Varo’s most notable art works is Homo Rodans, a skeletal construction of a fantastical creature with a wheel-like lower portion, presented as a museum specimen. Varo wrote a parodic scientific paper on the Homo Rodans, complete with Latin quotations and pseudonymous author name. Project for a Theater Piece is a story of theatrical quality and dreamlike interactions. It is regrettably short and its potential seems unfulfilled. It shares a fragmentary quality with the other pieces here. There is some automatic writing (Surrealist practice of writing images or words in free association, as derived from psychoanalytic practice) and fantastical recipes including one with ingredients of horseradish, garlic, honey, a brick and two false moustaches.
Ten dreams are described. There’s certainly more than a little curiosity value to a personal friend of Carrington and Wolfgang Paalen who records their appearances in her dream logs.
“I sat down to write two very important letters and left them (before putting them into their envelopes) on a table, and when I went back to retrieve them, I saw with annoyance that Eva’s gentlemen friends had dunked one of the letters in the oil-and-vinegar dressing of a salad they were eating and the other letter was soaking in the juices from some pieces of stewed meat on another plate.”
The most pleasing dream story is one where a condemned Varo metaphorically weaves a man into material of herself, making a woven egg-like structure, allowing her to die satisfied.
There is a compilation of allusive and short comments on the personal meaning of her paintings had for her. All of the paintings are late recently made paintings. The references Varo makes indicate the significance she attached to astrology, science, cooking, mythology, literature and history. While her literary style is not ornate or sophisticated, the writings have the appeal of being made for her own pleasure rather than being produced for an audience. They have lightness and humour without striving too hard for comic effect. This enjoyable collection will spur some readers to investigate Varo’s art and it gives us a glimpse of Varo’s character and the frames of reference for her as a creator. - Alexander Adams
https://alexanderadamsart.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/remedios-varo-letters-dreams-other-writings/