Remedios Varo was an artist whose work is richly steeped in mysticism, metaphysics, and spiritual inquiry. Her paintings are alchemical dreamscapes—dense with symbolism, esoteric references, and fantastical figures engaged in strange rituals or inner transformations. Far more than surrealist curiosities, Varo’s works form a visual philosophy, a cosmology where science, magic, and spirit are not opposites but parts of a greater, unified reality. She painted not from imagination alone, but from an intense inner life shaped by her exploration of esoteric traditions, spiritual practice, and a deep yearning for transcendence.
Born in 1908 in Spain and later settling in Mexico after fleeing war-torn Europe, Varo was profoundly shaped by both personal exile and intellectual freedom. Her spiritual interests were wide-ranging and serious—drawing from Gnosticism, Sufism, Kabbalah, the Tarot, astrology, Jungian psychology, Hermeticism, and the teachings of mystics like George Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. These influences informed not only the content of her paintings but their entire sensibility: art as spiritual experiment, as metaphysical map.
Her figures—often androgynous, monk-like beings or ethereal women—seem engaged in acts of quiet revelation. They navigate impossible architectures, peer through telescopes at inner worlds, or operate arcane machines that turn soul into light. In works like The Call or Creation of the Birds, the painter or alchemist is both subject and symbol—depicting a self in the process of transformation, tuning in to hidden forces and the sacred patterns of the universe. Art in Varo’s hands becomes not only depiction, but invocation.
She often portrayed the spiritual journey as a solitary one—her characters are seekers, travellers, experimenters. They are caught mid-process: studying, weaving, conjuring, floating through celestial corridors. This speaks not only to the esoteric traditions she admired, but to her personal understanding of the artist as a kind of spiritual scientist—working in secret, transmuting inner experience into vision.
Her technical precision—detailed brushwork, refined draughtsmanship, and softly glowing light—supports the illusion of reality while simultaneously making the fantastic feel entirely plausible. The world she presents is not chaotic or dreamlike in the Freudian sense; it is structured, meaningful, filled with laws, tools, and rituals. It suggests a universe governed by hidden logic, one that can be glimpsed through spiritual discipline and creative work.
Varo’s work resonates with the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below.” Her paintings frequently mirror cosmic and microcosmic scales—machines that replicate the movements of the stars, beings whose actions influence distant realms. This idea of correspondence reflects her belief that the inner world is not separate from the outer, but a reflection of it, and that art can illuminate that hidden correspondence.
Though aligned with Surrealism in her early career, Varo quickly moved beyond its focus on the unconscious and the irrational. Her vision was more ordered, more esoteric, concerned not with chance or eroticism but with the evolution of the soul. Her images are rites in themselves—gently humorous, strange, and full of grace.
Remedios Varo’s legacy is that of the visionary as alchemist. She created a body of work that maps the spiritual journey not in abstraction, but in metaphor and image—tender, luminous, and filled with reverence for the hidden workings of the universe. In her art, we are invited not just to observe, but to awaken.
