Remedios Varo: The Alchemist of Everyday Miracles

A Life Between Worlds

Remedios Varo (1908–1963) lived between geographies and disciplines, moving from Spain to France and finally to Mexico, where her most important body of work flourished. Trained in technical drawing and deeply influenced by science, mysticism, and esotericism, she approached painting as a laboratory of transformations.

Remedios Varo - Creation of the Birds

Varo is often placed under the umbrella of Surrealism, yet her work differs in crucial ways. Where Surrealism thrives on dream logic and rupture, Varo preferred structure, process, and continuity. Her paintings belong to Magical Neorealism: meticulously rendered interiors and landscapes where one precise impossibility reveals new truths about creation, gender, and imagination.

The Workshop of Miracles

Varo’s canvases often depict workshops, laboratories, and spaces of concentrated activity. The characters in her paintings, sometimes self-portraits in disguise, are not passive dreamers but researchers, makers, and alchemists.

In Creation of the Birds (1957), a cloaked figure sits at a table, turning light from the stars into pigments, channeled through instruments into the shapes of living birds. Knowledge itself becomes manual labor. The metaphysical is grounded in craft.

Remedios Varo - The lovers

In The Lovers (1963), two figures merge within an architectural shell, their intimacy transforming into alchemy. Love is not depicted as sentiment but as experiment, a fusion of matter and spirit.

Each image captures a moment when the everyday workshop becomes a site of cosmic revelation.

Science, Magic, and Care

Varo’s training in technical illustration gave her a precision that became the backbone of her art. Instruments, gears, compasses, and scientific tools populate her paintings, yet they are never cold. Instead, they serve as channels for transformation, bridging logic and myth.

Remedios Varo - The flautist

The works often contain subtle feminist undertones. The women in the canvases are seekers and makers, not muses. They take charge of knowledge, alchemy, and spiritual labor. In a mid-20th century art world dominated by male voices, Varo’s imagery redefined who could hold the role of visionary.

Stories That Open Midway

Like Rob Gonsalves, Varo creates paintings that feel like fragments of larger narratives. Viewers arrive in the middle of a process: the birds are already being created, the lovers already fusing, the laboratory already glowing with hidden energies.

Remedios Varo - The World Beyond

This narrative pressure invites speculation. What came before? What comes after? The painting is not static but alive with unfolding time.

Why Varo Matters Now

In our own era of ecological and technological uncertainty, Varo’s paintings resonate with new urgency. They remind us that science and imagination, technology and spirituality, do not have to be enemies. They can be fused into acts of care, transformation, and survival.

Remedios Varo - Creation of the world or microcosm

Her art also offers a critique of gender roles. By placing women at the center of creation and discovery, Varo anticipates contemporary debates about equity in knowledge and representation. She demonstrates that the miraculous does not belong to distant myths but to ordinary rooms, worktables, and bodies.

The Alchemy

Remedios Varo died in Mexico City in 1963 at just 54 years old, leaving behind a relatively small but extraordinarily influential body of work. Today, her paintings are celebrated as masterpieces of visionary art, standing alongside those of her close friend Leonora Carrington and fellow exile Leonor Fini.

Varo’s legacy is not one of escape but of transformation. She teaches us that the extraordinary is woven into the ordinary, waiting for attention and imagination to activate it.

The Everyday as Laboratory

The promise of Varo’s art is not flight from reality but deep immersion into it. By inserting a single impossibility into her carefully crafted worlds, she shows that the everyday is already miraculous if we learn to look closely.

Remedios Varo - Amoebiasis or vegetables

In the laboratory of her canvases, science becomes myth, intimacy becomes alchemy, and the ordinary becomes a field of credible miracles. To see Varo’s work is to believe that transformation is always possible—even within the most ordinary room.