Useless Science, or The Alchemist
REMEDIOS VARO
REMEDIOS VARO, 1958
One of the ‘Three Witches of Surrealism’, Remedios Varo searched constantly for hidden knowledge. She accessed worlds beyond physical comprehension and translated these in a heady blend of oil and canvas. A female alchemist draped in the checkerboard ground she sits upon turns a wheel towards eternal life. The smoke seems to escape the painting and pollute our world while the bell tower disappears behind the canvas. “I deliberately set out to make a mystical work”, said Varo, “in the sense of revealing a mystery, or better, of expressing it through ways that do not always correspond to the logical order, but to an intuitive, divinatory and irrational order”.