Remedios Varo – The Tower

“I lived in the leaning towerOf melancholy …The spiders of tedium, the grayest spiders,Wove and wove in grayness and silence.

Oh! the dank tower,Filled with the sinisterPresence of a great owlLike a soul in torment;

So mute, that the silence in the tower is twofold;So sad, that without seeing it, we are chilled by the immenseShadow of its sorrow.”

(Delmira Agustini, Oh You!)

Remedios Varo, The Tower (Vejez), 1948

I am madly fascinated by the works of the Spanish female Surrealist painter Remedios Varo and her painting “The Tower” intrigues me the most at the moment, and has for a few months actually. Remedios Varo lived and worked in Spain and France, but in 1942 she moved to Mexico where she finally found the tranquility that she was searching for all those years. Apart from a year spent in Venezuela, the year in which the painting “The Tower” was painted, Varo spent the remaining years of her life living in Mexico. The painting shows a pink tower in an isolated setting. We can only guess what the purpose of the tower was before, but in its present state it is becoming overgrown in ivy and there is a long crack going through it. The openings for doors and windows are hollow and dark, like eyesockets without eyes. There is a dark tree in the foreground, its roots are piercing heavily into the ground bellow, and, just like the windows in the tower, it is dark and hollow inside. There is only one branch on the tree which is green and alive, but there is a lot of weeds growing on the ground, as if nobody has set foot there in a long time. Behind the tower is a forest, strangely not a dense and dark one, but a forest almost bald where trees are but ghosts, thin and almost pale, as if they are fading away.

Varo loved the langugage of symbols and dreams, and this painting indeed looks like a strange dream, the one in which one might wander around confused, lost and sad. The tree is dark and almost dead. The tower is lonely, forgotten and falling to ruins; who would want to linger on around this place were this a dream indeed? Giorgio de Chirico, the master of painting strange, isolated and unsettling spaces, has a painting called “The Red Tower” from 1913 which also shows a lonely tower, not cracked but sturdy and closed off to the world. In tarot the sixteenth card of the major arcana is “The Tower” which carries a meaning of chaos, disaster and sudden change, but it also signals the point of awakening, an important stage of breakdown and rebuilding so our horizons can expand. The corresponding astrological planet of the card is Mars, a planet with a fiery, warlike, foreceful, masculine energy which can bring destruction but also a release, a breakthrough. In the tarot card the tower is always accompanied with lightning bolt which isn’t present in Varo’s painting, but the crack on the tower’s facade might be a match.

The sturdy, strong stone walls of the tower may be a source of safety, a tempting comfort of security, but only after the lightning strucks and the tower starts decaying we can see how stale the chambers inside were, how solitary and claustrophobic, how defining and confining. Just think of the ladies in the tower; the Rapunzel, trapped there by the evil witch, letting her hair loose when the Prince comes, eager for him to save her, or the Lady of Shalott, weaving her embroidery in solitude. Even the poetess Delmira Agustini writes “I lived in the leaning tower of melancholy…”; the tower if not an actual physical tower may be taken as a symbol, an emotional tower that we have imprisoned ourselves in. The tower may suddenly seem small and insignificant, just like a person we might have been afraid of, or held in high esteem, and now we saw them in true light and are free from their control or judgement. It is interesting to also see how the tower is depicted in a tarot card painted by a contemporary Spanish artist Victoria Frances; the lady in a long white gown, like a Gothic heroine, is seen leaving behind the dark and lonely tower or a castle, leaving behind what is no longer necessary for further development, following the Star, which is the following card, and the hope it brings.

Tarot Card by Victoria Frances

Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower (La torre rossa), 1913