La imaginería simbólica y arquetípica en las pinturas y textos de Remedios Varoun camino creativo en comparación con las ideas, obras y técnicas surrealistas

Abstract

This research is a specific study on the artist Remedios Varo (Anglès, 1908 - Mexico City, 1963), between her creative and existential experience, with the intention of examining her unique personality, which has contributed to enriching with her own creative path the artistic world and the international literary climate of the 20th century. Her itinerary is developed in relation to the surrealist avant-garde, which the artist knew between the 1930s and 1940s, establishing relationships with some of its exponents, as Benjamin Péret and Victor Brauner, but her research depends on her desire for self-realization and on her divergent nature, avoiding any classification. Her legacy is distinguished by authenticity and experimentation in the cultural and historical context and the intention is to explore aspects of her art and life in combination, for understanding, through philological and comparative analysis of sources, of avant-garde influences and to see how she is able to integrate and modify them, working independently, especially when she migrated to Mexico in the early 1940s. The main and general objectives are focused on the reevaluation of her personality in the female universe to recognize her singular trajectory in the international context and not only local or marginal, clarifying her contributions and differences, such as confluences and divergences with the surrealist environment, because her itinerary diverges, at least in part from the orthodoxy of the movement founded by André Bretón. To verify what is proposed in the hypothesis, we have chosen the qualitative methodology, addressing a complete analysis of her paintings and writings, through continuous comparison, by analogy and by divergence, or by similarity or by contrast, or also by affinity and diversity, with respect to the typical elements of the avant-garde, such as psychic automatism in relation to automatic writing, the game of the exquisite corpse, the fortuitous juxtaposition and the disorienting effect, the omnipotence of desire, the dream as vision and potential of the imaginary, metamorphism and critical paranoia, alchemical transmutation, irony regarding black humor, concepts of space and time, the totemic and symbolic object and its connection with examples of works by surrealist authors, through some specific case studies. We have concluded that Remedios Varo especially in the Mexican period, which coincides with her artistic maturity, brings together her experiences in a hybridization that characterizes her as a versatile artist capable of expressing eclecticism in its most positive sense, as a harmonious melting pot of elements extracted from trends, theoretical principles, different styles, using traditional and innovative techniques, between past and present, ranging beyond a single artistic current. She thus stands out for her heterodox position towards the surrealist avant-garde, reaching a true syncretism that also anticipates the artists who are crossing the avant-gardes and who in recent decades have based their creative universe on hybridization. Through her knowledges and graphic and pictorial production, she highlights a career that becomes a testimony of resilience, because she perseveres along and across the limit, as an "alternative voice" and a complete artist. Her work has allowed her to achieve notoriety after her death, to be considered in retrospect by foreign critics, as well as by the art market, for her original and connotative research between mystery, fantasy, alchemy, totemic symbolism, irony and her own unmistakable style in the context of the 20th century. Keywords: Remedios Varo, Surrealism, alchemy, metamorphism, dream, imaginary, irony, hybridization, melting pot, resilience.