Guanajuato, Gto., January 3, 2017.- Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Tristan Tzara, Joan Miró and René Magritte, are just a few of the most renowned names of the artistic movement known as Surrealism. However, what do we know about the participation of women in this vanguard?

Dr. Inés Ferrero Cándenas reflects on this issue; professor at the Department of Spanish Letters of the University of Guanajuato (UG), who has taken the task to research the work from essential authors such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Bridget Bate or Alice Rahon, who widened our conception of the Surrealism and the world.

The surrealists left manifests, letters or conferences that are a testimony of the ideological suppositions and parting from which we understand this movement. Among these stand out the interest for the myths, symbols, folklore, legends and other forms of collective creation; the criticism of the civic values of the bourgeoisie; the search for the true reality through the human subconscious; and live as an art work.

In consonance with the rejection of the informative or descriptive vision of the reality is the concept of merveilleux (the wonderful), which according the Surrealist Manifest "is always beautiful" and even, "we must say that only the wonderful is beautiful."

According Dr. Ferrero, the woman, her body and psyche were a key to the concept of "le merveilleux", since it was informed at the same time for the notion of "crazy love" (amour fou).

However, for the professor, this idea pushed the women to a position of beauty object, an eternal ideal of femme-enfant (woman child), but never as artists, creators, as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Bridget Bate or Alice Rahon were; artists that broke the precepts of the orthodox surrealism.

The researcher points out that these artists presented themselves as independent of the closed circle of André Breton, in addition that most of them were much younger than their male colleagues, so they made their work years later after leaving the group. In this sense, you could talk about a parallel movement or some sort of post-surrealism.

The compared literature professor assures that the vision of these artists widens and compliments that of men because it goes beyond the body and presence of the female figure as an access key to the surreal state. You must watch the paintings of Remedios Varo or Leonora Carrington to watch how they re-elaborate the subjects of alchemy, nature, magic, science or astrology. Likewise, these artists provide a narrative structure to her paintings that is practically absent in all the male authors.

Hence, she detailed, in the works from these artists we almost always find female or androgen figures and from the position of the creator, the sorceress, the enlightened, the seer, but never from the position of object, muse or key to the wonderful.

Dr. Inés Ferrero Cándenas cleared that, even when there is a lot of critic material on these authors, in comparison, it's still shaded by the orthodox members in the History of Art. Hence, it is important to continue a rescue labor of their artistic and literary production. In this sense, she said, we wouldn't only be talking about surrealism, but history in general.