![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Thus, even though Varo’s work is said to be about a quest for hidden knowledge (Lauter) or even a rite of passage, a ‘viaje iniciático’ (González 36–7), terms which evoke the idea of liminality in an anthropological sense, discussion circles around this point, with no further investigation of the term limen or liminality. Yet the concept of the limen and the way in which it provides a key term for the analysis of the painter’s work (and a way in this respect to rethink surrealism’s esoteric ambitions) has not been discussed. All these critics are aware of a connection with surrealism’s trespass of other thresholds, in-between dream and waking life, the real and the marvellous and all, at the same time, acknowledge that the point of such a crossing is to secure ‘higher knowledge’, as the painter herself stressed. Raised in a strict Spanish family and rigorously trained in academic art, Varo first found escape in Barcelona's bohemian avant-garde. And so she underscores what other critics (Kaplan Martín) have identified as a dominant theme of fantastic journey in the painter’s work. The adventures that fill the strange and wonderful paintings by Remedios Varo (1908-1963) reflect the physical and psychological journeys of her own tumultuous life. According to Mexican critic Juliana González, Remedios Varo’s surrealist work presents a heroine crossing an ‘umbral’ (limen, or threshold) into a ‘trasmundo’ beyond the natural and the supernatural (38). ![]()
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