Remedios Varo fled Europe for Mexico, becoming a top Surrealist painter

CHICAGO — “Sometimes I wonder,” wrote Graham Greene, “how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”

Greene was revealing his creator’s bias. There are many ways, besides writing and art, to escape what is hardest about being human. But if we are all trying to escape something, it’s also true, as the psychoanalyst Michael Balint wrote, that whenever we run away from something, we are running toward something else.

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Remedios Varo, like many other artists, escaped Europe during World War II. Born in Spain, she ended up in Mexico. But there’s a sense in which she never stopped running away — and toward.

When I tell you that a Remedios Varo show at the Art Institute of Chicago (through Nov. 27) contains just 20 paintings, you may think it a minor exhibit — a placeholder, perhaps, between blockbusters, probably not worth traveling to see. But then you mightn’t have seen what — and how — Varo (1908-1963) painted.

One of her best-known works, “Creation of the Birds” from 1957, depicts an alchemist at work. (Like most of the paintings in the show, it’s on loan from the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.) What does an alchemist look like?

I couldn’t confidently say. But Varo’s alchemist is a female painter with the face of an owl and a feathered body. Sitting at an octagonal table, she holds a triangular prism that refracts starlight coming in through the arched window onto the page in front of her. With her other hand, she holds a paintbrush connected by a tube to the sound hole of a small stringed instrument, which dangles from a cord around her neck.

The refracted beams of light, and perhaps also music from the instrument, appear to give three-dimensionality and life to what the feathered alchemist is depicting: small birds. One flies out the window. Two more flutter off the page.

Meanwhile, a palette with colored paints is connected to a scientific apparatus resembling something from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Glass pipes feed in through an oval-shaped window, connecting the night outside to a crystal orb, two egg-shaped vessels and fork-like prongs that squirt primary colors onto a painter’s palette.

This, then, is art as alchemy; paint and light as bestowers of life. If the alchemist were entirely human, we would read Varo’s vision one way. The fact that she — a creator of images of birds — is herself part bird should clue us in to the depth of Varo’s belief in cosmic correspondences among animals and humans, music, colors and the movements of the stars.

If Varo’s imagery is bewitching, the process behind her paintings is just as engrossing. The exhibition catalogue includes a taxonomy of her techniques, co-authored by Mary Broadway and Katrina Rush. It provides a reminder that Varo didn’t just illustrate alchemy. She was trying to enact it.

Varo painted onto gesso panels, which she first scratched (possibly with quartz crystals) so they would hold more paint. She transferred full-scale cartoons onto the gesso panels, thinning her paint so much that it resembled watercolor or ink.

For backgrounds (mostly), she used techniques that produced strange textures and chancy effects. These included decalcomania (pressing one scrunched-up material against the painting’s surface), blotting (a subtractive technique using absorbent material), sponging (an additive technique that gives the paint the same texture as the porous sponge), soufflage (thin paint blown around on the painting’s surface, often using a straw) and spattering (using a stiff paintbrush).

She also used inlay, and for the faces of her central figures, she was fond of inlaid mother-of-pearl, a shimmering substance from the inside of shells that has long been associated with creativity.

Varo painted her figures and settings with very fine brushes, setting exquisite details against those chance-dependent background effects. For hair, fur and feathers, she often used tools — possibly ice picks and needles — to scratch back into the paint, revealing the white gesso beneath (sgraffito).

Painting, then, was the cauldron in which Varo brewed her potions. She tossed everything in. She was one of three women — the others were Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna — who came to be known as “the three witches,” because of their shared interest in magic and the occult.

All three found themselves in Mexico City after fleeing, one by one, the great cities of Europe, convulsed at the time by fascism, war and the Holocaust. Horna was Jewish. Carrington, who was English, and Varo were both raised Catholic. As if to signal their intimacy, Horna, a photojournalist, made a portrait of Varo wearing a mask made by Carrington.

All three women were involved in the surrealist movement. But surrealism had lost a lot of its mojo after the war, and by the late 1950s, Varo was saying: “I don’t belong to any group, I paint whatever comes to mind, and that’s it.”

That’s good to remember. Varo tends to be lumped with her surrealist friends and fellow expats. Even at the last Venice Biennale, where the Peggy Guggenheim museum and Biennale curator Cecilia Allemani put female surrealists under the spotlight, it was easy to get her confused with Carrington and fellow surrealist Leonor Fini.

Singling Varo out feels overdue. The Chicago exhibition, organized by the art institute’s Caitlin Haskell and independent curator Tere Arcq, is the first museum solo show of her work in the United States in more than 20 years. Varo’s approach and sensibility were distinctive, her paintings not only enchanting and mind-bending but often hilarious.

One painting, called “Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (Could be Juliana),” shows a woman stepping out of a session having successfully resolved her daddy issues: She holds a man’s shrunken head upside-down by his gauzy white beard, ready to discard it like so much refuse.

Another work shows a woman and her cat, human hair and feline fur mutually charged by electrified sympathy. (The painting is in fact called “Sympathy.”)

The show also includes a display of works on paper and related material in an octagonal space defined by partition walls. (Octagons held special significance for Varo.) It is full of contraptions: wheels, hurdy-gurdies connected to wings, clothes that become vehicles, floating boats that become mystical homes.

Varo had studied at the same school in Spain as Salvador Dalí. She became interested in the Russian-Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff and in Tarot. She believed the cosmos was organized by a universal system that manifests itself in music, architecture, mathematics, and the movements of the planets and stars.

Originally inspired by the theories of Sigmund Freud, surrealism had spread to Mexico after the Guatemalan writer Luis Aragón moved there in the 1930s. “We are in the land of convulsive beauty, the land of edible delusions,” wrote Aragón, trying to persuade the surrealists’ leader, André Breton, to leave Paris and join him in Mexico.

If not beautiful, Varo’s escape from the violent chaos of Europe, via Morocco, was certainly convulsive and surely traumatic. She spoke of putting “land and huge amounts of water between myself and such catastrophes.”

Many of Varo’s notions feel like flimsy fancies, wishful thinking, mad narratives spinning out of a wheel turned by a compulsive, panicky foot on the pedal. She seemed to need to add mystery to the harshness of reality by, in a sense, hiding from it, escaping toward the occult. (“Occult” comes from the Latin “occulere,” to hide or conceal.)

But it’s also clear that a reparative impulse fed her growing conviction that behind so much chaos and destruction there had to be an invisible harmony, on a different scale, with different parameters.

“Remedios Varo: Science Fictions” culminates with a remarkable triptych painted in 1960-1961. The first of the three panels shows a group of female novices being led away under some kind of spell. However, one of them looks out at the viewer, resisting the hypnosis.

The second shows the women embroidering cloth in an octagonal tower, the cloth spilling out of the tower like Rapunzel’s hair. The story’s heroine is embroidering a cloth that literally plots her own escape.

The final panel, “The Escape,” shows her liberated from the tower, united with the lover she had embroidered into being and finally in command of her own fate.

Abstract painters such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, working at roughly the same time, appeared just as intent as Varo on harnessing the primal energy of creative acts. But their works, you could argue, were also restrained, silent and respectful of the unsayable.

They perceived a hidden unity in things, but they were allergic to the idea of illustrating that perception with concocted narratives. That’s why their works have a gravitas that Varo’s lacks.

Yet the paintings of the postwar abstract painters were so reduced and distilled that their iterations became repetitive, at times almost rote.

Varo — with her devotion to technique, her excellent draftsmanship, her harnessing of painting’s enduring role as a portal to religious and mystical mind-sets — reminds us that art never has to follow one path. It can always escape its own confines.

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions Through Nov. 27 at the Art Institute of Chicago. artic.edu.

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Remedios Varo fled Europe for Mexico, becoming a top Surrealist painter