Remedios Varo’s Appearances and Disappearances

With the visible violence of wind scattering

clouds, but with greater delicacy, as if she

painted with her eyes rather than with her

hands, Remedios sweeps the canvas clean and

heaps up clarities on its transparent surface.

In their struggle with reality, some painters

violate it or cover it with signs, explode it

or bury it, flay it. Remedios volatizes it:

it is not blood but light that flows through

its body.

She slowly paints lightening-quick apparitions.

Appearances are the shadows of archetypes.

Remedios does not invent: she remembers.

Except that these appearances resemble nothing

and no one.

Sea voyages within a precious stone.

A speculative painting, a mirror-image painting:

not the world in reverse, but the reverse

of the world.

The art of leviatation: the loss of gravity,

the loss of seriousness. Remedios laughs,

but her laughter echoes in another world.

Space is not an expanse but a magnet attracting

Appearances. A woman’s hair… the strings

of a harp… the sun’s rays streaming down

… the strings of a guitar. The world seen

as music: listen to Remedios’s lines.

The secret theme of her work: harmony… lost

equality.

In Appearance she paints Disappearance.

Roots, fronds, rays, locks of hair, flowing

beards, spirals of sound: threads of death,

of life, of time. The weft is woven and un-

woven: the unreality that we call life, the

unreality that we call death… only the canvas

is real. Remedios the anti-Moira.

She does not paint time, but the moments when

time is resting.

In her world of stopped clocks, we hear the

flow of substances, the circulation of shadow

and light: time ripening.

Forms seek their own form, form seeks its own

dissolution.

- Octavio Paz