Pain 1948

Remedios Varo’s ‘Pain’ is a strange world made with surreal architectural forms and a foreboding palette. I can imagine her there, mixing paint, building up these delicate layers, figuring it out as she went. It's hard to know exactly when Varo painted this, but looking at it, I'm struck by the tension between control and surrender. There is a figure splayed out on a torture device in the middle of all these towers, their fate unknown. What was on her mind? Perhaps she was interested in how we can't always be free, sometimes we are restrained? The colours are not lurid, they feel as if she is inviting us into her world and the precision of her rendering makes it even more so. The brickwork on the tower is so crisp and yet the sky is like a roiling mass. Painters are always talking to each other, you know? Varo, with her surrealism and precision, is in conversation with the dreamscapes of De Chirico and Ernst, while also blazing her own, very particular, path. It's that exchange, that push and pull, that keeps art alive. It remains an open question.