The mystical scene by Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo set a world record

“Surrealism became for Remedios Varo a means of understanding the universe, a mechanism by which it broke out of scientific principles and linear logic. Her works, which intertwine the world of dreams and psychedelic “ancestral memory”, are imbued with intuitive solutions and intellectual curiosity. Basics of mechanics and architecture, attention to the smallest details, a passion for alchemy and occultism, philosophical reflections and dreams – all this is in the personal world of Varo, mysterious and fantastic”.
“Harmony (Possible Self-Portrait), created in 1956, is a canonical example of Varo’s complex visual vocabulary. Here, her “animistic belief in the power of objects and in the interrelationship between plant, animal, human and mechanical worlds” is poetically manifest. The artist, who had knowledge of craft and technique, pays extremely much attention to detail – each stroke has a clear purpose. In fact, Varo’s paintings are built from details. The imitation of the principles of scientific illustration and the technical precision of “Harmony” is reminiscent of the drawings she made during her scientific expedition to the Orinoco River in Venezuela ten years earlier.

Reflecting her own spiritual quests and autobiographical journeys, Varo was increasingly filling her picturesque universe with “the fantastic adventures of enlightenment, spiritual purification and order,” writes Janet Kaplan in her biography Remedios Varo. Unpredictable journeys”. In late works such as “To the Tower” (1960), which over the past six years was the most expensive work of the artist, these stories have become more allegorical and biographical.

In Varo’s Harmony, she draws on the structural principles of music, which served as an important symbol of organization in the creation of her pictorial stories. “Music [for Varo] is a deliberately structured structure, and so it acts as an agent in organizing life in several works,” writes art historian Alan Friedman.

Meditative, peaceful energy surrounds a lonely figure (Varo himself), while around her a strange, supernatural chaos occurs: floorboards open and release ghostly sheets of paper, boxes and chest open, opening strange natural ephemerals, birds try to fly away, but fall into the trap of optical illusions, from the walls appear ghostly creatures. “Although there is confusion in this monastic cell, we feel that the advent of harmonious order here is only a matter of time,” said Whitney Chadwick.