In July of 1935 Remedios Varo met Óscar Domínguez who was spending the summer in Barcelona. Shortly after, they were joined by French painter Marcel Jean. With their new friends, who participated directly in the activities of the Surrealist group in Paris, Remedios Varo and her partner, Esteban Francés, started playing the game of the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), although they introduced a new element: the collage. “We cut out characters, objects, animals… from old magazines which we glued onto pieces of paper. After hiding one’s own collage, each participant would pass the sheet of paper to the next collabortor.”

The collage juxtaposes disparate elements in order to create a new enigmatic whole. In Catalogue des ombres [Catalog of Shadows], Varo incorporated parts from diverse origins (product catalogs, an infant Jesus from a scene of the Madonna and child, and hands from an advertisement), to give rise to modern narratives and myths. It is impossible to establish a hierarchy between the different details that configure the final image, which is open to multiple readings and full of contradiction and mystery.