What a Herculean task it would be to name the thesis of Remedios Varo, an artist whose paintings encompass astrology, alchemy, musicology, and myth. Typically relegated to the margins in US and European narratives of Surrealism, the Spanish-born painter earned far greater renown in Mexico during the last half of her life. This period of the artist’s late work, on exquisite display at the Art Institute of Chicago, deploys science and allegory side by side to examine their intersection. While visible forces of optics and chemistry occupy many of the paintings, an even more pervasive energy echoes throughout the body of work: music.

Remedios Varo. Armonía (Harmony), 1956. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid

Like the Bretonian surrealists before her, Varo’s paintings endeavor to extend the limits of imagination at work in our physical realities. Many compositions appear to operate visually on first impression, such as the fusion of a checkered robe and floor in Useless Science or The Alchemist (1955). But a closer look cannot ignore the laboratory’s ringing bells and grinding gears. Mixing spoons clink in a rhythmic swirl within the scientist’s glass distillery. The alchemical creation of the world is noisy work, and Varo’s scenes situate viewers resolutely in their soundscape. Although the artist viewed sonic energy as just one thread of an imperceptible lattice of forces connecting material and metaphysical worlds, sound underpins many of her finished compositions.

Much of Varo’s late work responds to the theory of objective music advanced by philosopher George I. Gurdjieff, which asserts music’s capacity to physically alter the environment. Illustrations of such sonic animacy take center stage in works like The Flutist (1955) and Magic Flight (1956), wherein melodies draw order from their surroundings. Both works showcase Varo’s masterful use of sgraffito to slice delicate cuts into her paintings, which emanate from each instrument to dance across the surface. In the first work, a flutist propels fossils from a primordial landscape to erect an octagonal spire, symbolically building on the 8-tone scale of Western composition. Magic Flight, by comparison, depicts a pensive performer whose swirling hurdy-gurdy hoists its listener above the ground. The suspended figure is held aloft as a dramatic puppet of objective musical affect. Both works directly engage Gurdjieff to manifest sonic influence on the built world and its inhabitants.

Students visiting Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, photograph by Christine Mehring.

Varo orchestrates a deeply nuanced scene of the sound-receiver relationship in Harmony (1956), a dim interior illuminated solely by the radiating glow of a composer’s desk. Here objective music approaches its most abstract form by paradoxically building with concrete materials. Leaves, shells, roots, crystals, and even paper scraps scribbled with mathematical formulas line the ledgers of an ephemeral score. An anchoring treble clef assures viewers of the composer’s work, but the prospective listener can only imagine the melody sung by such sundry objects. In fact, the agency of the composer itself is questioned in this tableau. A mirrored set of architectural apparitions emerges to undermine the songwriter’s efforts. The spirits breach the walls of the studio and string their own material notes among the harmonies. Concentrating steadfastly on one piece of music, the composer seems unaware of their ghostly complement at work in the shadows.

Here Varo subtly alludes to a crucial upshot of Gurdjieff’s objective music theory: if sound holds the potential to operate in excess of melody, could the physical world itself not respond in its own affective harmony? Varo surrounds her figures time and again with noise. By restaging the ambient hum of the soundscape as an active lifeforce, Varo calls attention to the embodied sound of an animate universe always and already at work on its audience.

Christian Bumala