A singular vision: art and intellect of Remedios Varo

"Today I do not belong to any group. I paint what occurs to me and that is all."

These reflections of Remedios Varo from an interview in 1957, just six years before her sudden and untimely death in 1963, speak to the singular vision and inner fortitude of one of Mexico's most important 20th-century artists.



A member of the famed Parisian surrealist circle of Andre Breton in the 1930s, Remedios Varo absorbed these influences yet remained always apart. With a visual language that's as steampunk as it is surrealist, Varo's work appeals to a wide variety of audiences young and old. Fleeing imprisonment, war and fascism in Europe, Varo found stability and a welcome refuge in Mexico City and is today revered as one of Mexico's most important artists.

A new show at CECUT, running through February 2015, brings Remedios Varo's surrealistic dreamscapes for the first time to viewers in northern Mexico and southern California. On December 6, 2014 CECUT inaugurated the exhibition "La Dimensión del Pensamiento" (The Dimension of Thought) to an enthusiastic audience of more than 400 museum visitors. Beautifully lit and lovingly curated, the show features 29 paintings and 38 of Remedios Varo's books and notebooks, offering insights into Varo's intellectual formation and emotional life.

Curator Marisol Argüelles San Millán, director of Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City (MAM), explained that her curation of the show was based on her study of the library of Remedios Varo, preserved by art patron Ana Alexandra Vasoviano de Gruen. Together they considered the writers whom Varo herself read, those who created the intellectual environment that sustained her. From there, they developed the groupings for the exhibition-philosophy, historical novel, poetry, fantasy literature, and science fiction. The groupings allow the viewer to approach Remedios Varo's paintings with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of her own time.



Born in Spain in 1908, the daughter of an engineer, Remedios Varo read the adventure stories and futurist writings of Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe and learned to draw by copying her father's blueprints and technical drawings: each of these influences left a profound imprint on her technique and style. Later she studied art at the San Fernando Fine Arts Academy of Madrid, where Salvador Dali was an alumni. Cast about by war and threats of imprisonment in Spain and France in the 1930s, Varo and her husband surrealist poet Benjamin Péret moved to Mexico City in 1941, fleeing the Nazi occupation of France.



In the spring of 1956, Remedios Varo had her first solo show in Galería Diana in Mexico City and her work was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm. From the first exhibition, there were waiting lists of potential buyers.



Last year, the Museum of Modern Art commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Remedios Varo with an exhibition of her paintings and writings. After almost a year of work, CECUT Director Pedro Ochoa Palacios brought the exhibition from Mexico City to Tijuana, one of many outstanding exhibitions featured at CECUT in 2014.

In his speech at the opening, the director extended his thanks to the National Institute of Fine Arts (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, INBA), especially for the assistance of Silvia Navarette, director of Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City (MAM), for making it possible to bring the work to the Tijuana and Baja California public.



And Ochoa offered a warm welcome to Marisol Argüelles San Millán, Deputy Director of the MAM and collector and art patron Ana Alexandra Vasoviano de Gruen, who along with her husband Walter Gruen, in 2001 donated the 39 works of Remedios Varo to the MAM, widely considered a donation of genuine importance in the history of Mexican art.



Introducing the work of Remedios Varo, Ochoa cited poet Alberto Blanco:



"The road of art is not a road of certainty, it is a road of doubt. And Remedios Varo doubted. She investigated and questioned everything, but maintained a space of cautious discretion. Her unexpected, intense, secret travels were made always at midnight; that is to say, closely encircled and protected by the most adamant of skepticisms: that art is the road of doubt. We can leave certainty and truth to religion or to science, meanwhile Remedios wandered through the gothic streets of Barcelona before sunrise, with only her thoughts and doubts to keep her company, the light of the moon and her own shadow."



The show will be open in the El Cubo gallery until February 2015, open from Tuesday through Sunday. Cost is 48 pesos, or $3.50, and admission is free on Sundays.



See here for our gallery of photos from the exhibition.



jill.holslin@sandiegored.com