Remedios Varo’s paintings are filled with devices that almost look functional.
Wheels turn. Pipes connect rooms. Figures operate strange apparatus. Architecture behaves like machinery. Scientific instruments seem to have been designed for purposes that remain just outside ordinary logic.
A 2026 exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno brought together paintings, drawings, photographs, books and notebooks from the museum’s Remedios Varo collection. The material showed how carefully constructed this apparently dreamlike world actually was. The exhibition emphasised characters engaged in activities somewhere between scientific discovery and mystical ritual.
That combination is what keeps the paintings from becoming simple fantasy for me.
The impossible is presented with technical seriousness.
A machine may perform an absurd task, but somebody has still designed the gears.
Varo understood something that science fiction and experimental design repeatedly rediscover: an invented world becomes convincing when its objects obey internal rules.
You do not need to explain what the machine does completely.
You need to make it look as though somebody could.
That small difference gives imagination engineering.
https://www.gob.mx/cultura/articulos/remedios-varo-habitantes-de-lo-insolito
