April, 2008

Magical Garments: Surrealist Automatic Painting Techniques in the Paintings of Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo did not regard herself as a Surrealist, but she did recognize that she could learn much from them, to advance her own creative efforts. From the Surrealists, Varo learned to use unrestricted creative activity, symbolic metaphor, and automatic painting techniques. In her own way she merged her old master’s academic skills with Surrealist automatic techniques to get a fusion of randomness and control in her works. She never bought in to the ideas that art should come from dream analysis and the irrational subconscious mind. She was much more concerned with a conscious resolution to the work. Her work comes from a conscious effort, although as we will see, she also employs some use of automatism in backgrounds and garments. Surrealist automatic techniques like frottage, grattage, decalcomania create areas in her paintings that seem alive and random and activated. We see quite a bit of this in her backgrounds but also in the garments her figures wear . This contrasts with the tight control she used to render things like faces, and machines and lends the paintings a magical quality.

While Varo never considered herself a Surrealist, she did find their creative methods to be helpful in the development of her own work. She learned as much from them as she could, selecting aspects of the Surrealist philosophy that interested her, and rejecting the rest. Perhaps the most important thing she learned from them was how to tap into her creativity and use it in an unlimited way. She didn’t see dreams and fantasies as a source of access to the inner conscience but she liked the symbolic metaphors and the free flow of creativity. Andre Breton saw visual logic as an obstacle to the creative process, but Varo did not. Her academic training was not an impediment to her creative thinking, but she did use some Surrealist skills to loosen her imagination up. She was able to use conscious planning and premeditation to achieve highly imaginative results.

Varo wasn’t all that concerned with the dream analysis but her work has a dreamy quality. This comes from conscious effort, however, not from automatism. Her preliminary drawings while full of vivid imagination were meticulous and this is evident in the controlled academic painting technique she used. Drawing for Varo was a discipline that she had instilled in her since childhood. Every painting was meticulously worked out beforehand, with numerous preliminary drawings and even full scale cartoon transfers for the final work. Her final paintings were executed down to the smallest detail with virtuosity.

A surrealist gives the suggestion that creative decisions are made without so much prededitatiions, but until learning exquisite corpse and other creative techniques from the surrealists, she hadn’t seen drawing as a form of amusement. It was more of an intellectual exercise, 2which isn’t always conducive to free flowing creative ideas. The surrealists definitely helped her. Exquisite corpse taught her to think in an inconstrained manner and let her thoughts flow without limitation. So her creativity came through mostly in the planning phase rather than in the execution phse. Her painting techniques shows that she adhered to her academic background in her traditional, meticulous painting style. Through surrealism she found license to unleash her imagination in a way and to explore her own subjectivity. Her creative imagination was capable of translating inner world or other world experiences to the outr world thorugh conscious creative processes. Symbolic content through etaphor was more interesting to her than dream analysis.

The technique I wish to discuss here are some of the automatic techniques used by the Surrealists, specifidcally Max Ernst. These are the techniques of grottage, frottage, fumage, decalcomania and soufflage. Look at hter background and the garments her figures wear. They resemble the landscape in Ernst’s After the Rain. These were experimental techniques that tave her paintings a contrast to the tight rendering, and created areas that were more alive. SO with Varo it was a convergence of the traditional and the avante guarde.

An analysis of paintings in which a figure wears a garment made using one of the Surrealist techniques will reveal that Varo was adept at Surrealist techniques and combined them well with her meticulous academic style. We will see that decalomania, grattage, and soufflage gave the garments a magical life. And it seemed to make them come alive. We will also find that she applied these techniques with a level of control not normally seen in Surrealist’s works, like Max Ernst.

Varo apparently used a grattage technique to form the two hovering ethereal bodies that in Immured Figures, 1958. Their faces are meticulousely rendered, but their bodies are vague and randomly created in vertical striations that appear to come from a downward scraping motion through layers of pint. It gives the figures a dripping transparency. The floating figures could be in the wall, or just in front of it, like a Byzantine mosaic. This painting calls to mind the shimmering ethereality of Justinian and Theodora in the St. Vitale mosaics. They could be spiritual figures, or perhaps frescos that have come to life. However, they most likely are ghosts, memories of people, parents, perhaps, who the artist has immured into the walls of her mind. It seems as if she locked her memories up in the walls to keep them there. But they seem to dissolve and drip away, a puddle gathers on the floor beneath them. While the faces are still intact, it seems that the rest of the body is dissolving and the faces will soon dissolve as well. This could be the artist’s fear that she will completely forget someone until one day she can no longer recall their faces. Perhaps she has locked them into the walls to preserve them and save them for ever.

A slightly more lively use of Surrealist automatic techniques can be seen in Encounter, 1959. It appears the artist used either decalomania or soufflage to create the tattered edges of the worn fabric that winds around the woman seated at the table. The woman, possibly a medium or a seer looks tired and old. A watery blue cloak swirls around here, appearing tattered and threadbare in places. It seems that a blowing technique was used with the paint to make the fabric appear worn and the edges appear tattered. It also lsends movement and irregularity to the garment, as it swirls around her, taking on a life of its own and lending magical connotations to the piece. It also becomes waves, splashes and foam of the water. The fabric parallels with the appearance of blow water. It appears to either be flowing into our out of a box on her table, where we can see through the slightly lifted lid a pair of eyes. It is typical of Varo to have transmutations or transformations from one substance to another. The problem is, I cannot say for sure whether the garment turns into water which flows into the box, or the water flows out of the box and then swirls around her to become fabric. Judging by the forlorn expression on the face on the seated woman, it seems that her watery cloak is made up of her tears. I somehow think this also has to do with the memory or a person that she keeps in a box. Every once in a while she opens the box to look inside and recall the person whose memory she locked away. It could also be herself at a younger age. Whoever the person is, the relationship is now a sad one, as evidenced by the worn tattered fabric, made from the water of her tears.

The woman who emerges from the living wall in To Be Reborn, 1960, wears no cloak, her only garments are the flimsy gown that dissolves into the wall , and this she is shedding to step into the living room. She is drawn to a bowl of water on the table which holds the reflection of the moon as can be seen through a hole in the ceiling. I feel that she is some sort of a magical person, a witch or sorceress perhaps, or maybe she is a ghost who can pass through walls. Whoever she is, she is drawn by magnetic or gravitational force toward the reflection of the moon. The soufflage and decalomania technique in this painting, again rendered with a certain amount of control creates fungus like tendrils and fingers. They reach, like fingers toward the magical aura of the moon bowl. It is difficult to tell whether it is gravity or magnetic force that draws the fingers to reach toward the bowl.

Two works from 1961, both titled Personage, show a more exaggerated use of surrealist auatomatic painting techniques. In one, a figure of ambiguous gender stands before us, his outer-garment resembling a bird costume, radiating random yet clearly manipulated white rivulets of paint as if an electrical force has passed through him, causing his hair to stand on end. Streams of paint reach like long figures, possibly drawing in energy from the surrounding space. While the face and armor-clad legs seem masculine, the torso is feminine and hourglass shaped beneath a wing-shaped cloak that opens to reveal an orb shaped opening, suggestive of a fortune teller’s ball, within which we see a pair of feet descend a staircase. The treatment of the dribbled paint inside these wings seem to be less controlled than her other treatment. The streams of paint seem to have been created with the canvas tipped to control their directional flow. They form the shapes of the wings with controlled irregularity. More streams of white paint form another pair of wings on the head. I get the feeling this figure with the mercury-like wings, is a shaman or perhaps a medium. I feel that he is here to channel someone from another place. I get the sense that he is a medium making contact with someone between realms. Or channeling the energy of a god. The feathery garment seems to gather energy, or perhaps transmit it. I feel that we are in the position of being in the other realm. Like Mercury, he is a messenger sent to go between realms.

The other Personage from 1961 has the greatest randomness of splattered paint occurrence giving the figure a wild, energetic, and electrified appearance. A feminine figure rides on a multi-wheeled vehicle. The handling of the paint that creates a plume like aura around her appears to have been flung paint or possibly pressed like an ink blot. It speaks of vibrant energy that contradicts the ashen appearance of her face. It suggests to me that she is going through an explosive transformation. She is not quite alive, and not quite dead. Her body is leaving but her soul is expanding out into a new form. It is interesting to note that the vehicle that carries her has wheels traveling in all directions. In the logical world, even the most magical of us cannot travel in more than one direction at once. These wheels, combined with the mutlple directions of her aura go in many directions all at the same time. She is giving up her solid form which connects her to a linear existence. Something, possibly death, transforms her into pure energy, soon to be no longer bound by the restrictions of the body. From what is left of the shreds of her cloak it seems that she is a princess, but her physical clothing is dissolving into the cloak that explodes around her. The rendering of her clothing is tight and meticulous, but it dissolves into the random explosive energy as she changes into a new state.

The cloak worn by the priestess or medium in The Encounter, 1962, is also alive and bursting with energy. It bursts with energy and appears to have a mind of its own. This graceful figure approaches a door where an owl headed man looks back at her. The owl symbolizes the ability to see things that are hidden, in this case the alternative spiritual realms to which most of us are not privy. This woman is a medium with special powers and gifts. Her cloak is magical, its random lines of blown or pressed paint reaching out link fingers, blind feelers, picking up energy from the space around it. The coat is in a constant state of transformation and flux. It conveys that it surrounds her more as a force-field than anything material. It is in constant motion, contantly changing form and shape. It could energize her, or protect her and surround her in electrical energy. OR perhaps it is protection for us. It absorbs her powers and energy and creates a barrier that contains this energy, protecting us from her powers that are so strong they could harm us, like the beaded masks worn by Yoruba chiefs. She carries someone with her. It is perhaps a spare version of herself. It represents her ability to be reborn and to rejuvenate or reinvent herself.

In summary, the random quality of the paint gives life and action to contrast with the meticulously executed parts of the paintings. These cloaks have a vibrancy, a sort of magic or energy. They seem connected to alternative realms, memories, sorrow, death. They are a penetrable barrier into another dimension where things are not linear or physical, but very real. The electrified streams of paint both transmit and receive energy, they simultaneously protect and strengthen those who wear them. They are aids in traveling between the earthly and spiritual realms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lozano, Luis-Martin. The Magic of Remedios Varo. Chicago, D. Giles, Ltd. 2007.