Remedios Varo's Afterlife Party
Some painters have developed such a distinctive style and repertoire that it seems they have created a parallel world. For me, Remedios Varo has made an entire alternative reality and so I decided to ‘visit’ her world, which I imagine existing in her afterlife.
In this imaginary place, the anthropological joke Homo Rodans (see picture below) has come to life. Homo Rodans was a skeleton with a wheel rather than legs that Varo made from animal bones. She displayed it in a glass case along with lots of pseudo-scientific documents ‘proving’ that it was a genuine specimen of an evolutionary dead end for early human beings.
Others present at my imaginary afterlife party were, on the other hand, real: there is Benjamin Péret, surrealist poet and husband of Varo; André Breton, the self-appointed leader of surrealism; Fred Hoyle, an astronomer with some unusual ideas that Varo found fascinating and the photographer Kati Horna. Leonora Carrington also appears at Varo’s party because they were very close friends and did indeed delight in making up magic potions together.
Come with me now, then, to visit the extraordinary world of Remedios Varo.
(You may need to view this post on Substack to see it all: just click on the title and it’ll take you to my page.)
I found myself in a lush forest with foliage so delicate it seemed to have been painted with a fine brush. I had been thinking about the velvet woods with their oily, wet moss and numerous twigs in the paintings of Remedios Varo and also of a photograph of her sitting in a doorway smoking.
Then Varo herself stepped out from behind one of those liquid-tendrilled trees and I gave myself a shake to check that I wasn't dreaming
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Have you come for the party?’
I was so shocked that I replied ‘Yes. Is it your birthday?’
‘No, today is the 62nd anniversary of my death,’ she said ‘but that means I can invite whoever I like to my party and we can eat as much cake as we want without getting sick. Come along!’
She took me on a coracle powered by bicycles along a river with overhanging branches and we disembarked beside a woman who was sheltering inside the trunk of a tree.
There was a great noise of laughing and the clinking of bottles and glasses up ahead as well as fast fiddle music and the hollow thrum of dancing feet striking the floor. My guide led me up the steps and into an octagonal tower which was open to the dark night sky and the especially bright stars overhead.
‘Remedios!’ said an impish man with prominent ears, moving to embrace her.
‘Benjamin Péret!’ she cried, ‘how did you of all people get here?’
‘With André, of course,’ he answered. ‘Even now he won’t miss a gathering of the faithful.’
Hearing his name, the immaculately dressed M. Breton emerged from the throng and wordlessly bowed to us. I found I could think of nothing to say to surrealism’s greatest theorist and leader and he seemed to take my silence as admiration.
Looking around I began to distinguish at least two different types of partygoers. There were the clearly human ones and also more amorphous figures somehow managing to move their whole painted forms as if they were solid bodies. A particularly intimidating one of the' liquid' people was an enormously tall woman with two faces (one in the usual place and one on her chest). She wore a high collar, and her hair stood out on either side of her head for several feet in horizontal grey strands. She was carrying something in her hand with both delicacy and disgust. It was the head of a man upside down, which she held by the end of his beard.
'So much for psychoanalysis, eh?' Péret teased his friend Breton, whose face darkened with fury.
'Ah, come along,' said Remedios. 'We’ll leave the men to squabble over their theories of the unconscious. How about a drink?’
We made our way around the dancers who were all wearing the same costume of heavy grey. In fact, it was all one large cloak that they shared, making the steps very demanding to perform.
As we walked around them, I very nearly tripped over a hole in the floorboards where a tabby cat was hiding.
‘This is Fred Hoyle,’ said Remedios, introducing a bald man who was looking through a telescope. He was staring up at the heavens.
‘What do you see?’ I asked.
‘Dangerous. Very dangerous.’ He lowered the telescope and, without warning, placed his hand on my forehead.
‘Fred is worried about the diseases coming to us from outer space,’ explained Remedios. ‘I’m not entirely sure he’s right,’ she added quietly, but he had already returned his gaze to the sky.
Suddenly, all the guests took a step back as a sprightly older woman in black clothes reversed through the crowd, beckoning and directing the most peculiar, animated object. It was a figure with a head and body mounted on a wheel and all the parts were made of pale white bones. It made the most tremendous clicking noise as the interlocking elements moved along.
‘Leonora! You have found Rodans! Where was he?’
‘Just off on his travels, as usual. I caught him messing about with the magician.’
The reckless bone creature, who had a blanched, comical grin, wheeled off into the dancing crowd, swivelling and darting in different directions in time with the music. It tipped dangerously from side to side and hands went out to catch it in case it fell but the structure was secure and its movements were surprisingly graceful.
‘Where’s Kati?’ asked Leonora.
‘Here I am.’ Kati Horna, with a camera slung casually around her neck, emerged from the crowd with a tray of steaming cups. ‘Dream tea anyone?’ she called out.
‘Is it my old recipe?’ asked Leonora.
‘The very same,’ replied Remedios, ‘but with all the alterations we worked on together.’
Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna: three friends reunited once more, toasted each other with the dream tea. Then gradually, elegantly and easily they began to rise up into the air, hoisted aloft by a figure who was playing a hurdy gurdy. They hung there like Renaissance angels.
Remedios passed a hand over her cup, transforming it into paint, and blew hard. The colours flew out and spread across the whole gathering, turning it into the most intricate and colourful scene and now, in your mind, reader is the scene that she created.
I finally finished my review of "Swimming With Tigers." Did you see it? I really enjoyed the book!