Online galleries have made profiles like this short Mexican film rather redundant, but it’s good to know that someone went to the trouble of presenting Varo’s paintings in this way at a time (1967) when you’d be lucky to see more than one of them in a book on Surrealist art. Jomí García Ascot’s camera roams among the details of Varo’s dreamworlds while Spanish voices read from a variety of Romantic and other texts. I hadn’t noticed before the amount of cats in Varo’s paintings. Look for the felines here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pynchon and Varo
• Remedios Varo’s recipe for erotic dreams
Watch out for those green cats! They want to leap off the canvas.
The companion catalog for the upcoming exhibition in Chicago is being published in the states this week, and Wakefield Press is about to reissue their collection of Varo’s writings. There was a book published in 2008 entitled The Key to the Secret World of Remedios Varo which discussed the sources of her imagery and ideas but it currently commands, well, surrealist prices. Shame it’s long out of print. From the thumbnails I’ve seen it looks gorgeous. In tandem with the exhibition, maybe…?
In alchemy one of the symbolic figures is a green lion. Most artists wouldn’t be alluding to this if they painted a green cat but in Varo’s case you can’t be too certain.