20^th Century Spanish
 
Varela is regarded as the most important artist from Alicante in the first half of the 20^th century. With a painting that reveals a conversant knowledge of Impressionism, and Expressionism, he evolved towards more personal postulates in a local cultural and artistic realm. His practice was concerned with capturing and rendering the dazzling light of the Mediterranean and the colour of his urban and rural surroundings.

His natural talent for drawing encouraged his parents to enrol him, at the age of twelve, at the school run by Lorenzo Casanova, the painter from Alcoy, which changed its name to Círculo Casanova Academia de Bellas Artes after his death. There, the young Varela studied until 1905, when he moved to Madrid to further his training under Joaquín Sorolla, with whom he forged a strong friendship. It was the maestro himself who encouraged Varela to take part at the National Exposition of Fine Arts in 1906, where he won an honorary mention for a piece titled Las gitanillas. From Sorolla he learned his technique and brushwork, the use of colour and the depiction of light, and following his advice he began to use cardboard as a support for his works, due to the textures and qualities it provided, and he would continue using it for the rest of his career. He gained firsthand knowledge of the work of the old masters in his years in Madrid, thanks to his constant visits to the Prado museum.

He established a close friendship with Salvador Tuset at Sorolla’s studio, where he remained until 1908, when he had to return to Alicante after the continuous refusals of the Alicante Provincial Council to grant him a scholarship. On his return, he did his compulsory military service and continued painting. However, it was not until 1918 when the quality of his creations—a true revolution in the provincial atmosphere of his hometown—began to be known, thanks to an exhibition at Círculo de Bellas Artes in Alicante. As from that moment, his prestige rocketed.

Sorolla eased his entry into the intellectual circles of Alicante, of which the composer Óscar Esplá and the author Gabriel Miró were members, and he became an active participant in the city’s Ateneo. Through Benjamín Palencia and Daniel Vázquez Díaz he gained access to the art scene of Paris, a city he visited in 1928.

For Varela, the 1920s and 1930s marked the peak of his practice. However, in 1935 the first signs of a crisis of self-esteem appeared, which would remain with him till the end of his life.

His painting combines portraits against a flat background or a symbolist landscape in which the human figure acquires a nearly ascetic stylisation and elegance. His obsessively painted self-portraits capture his life experiences and his way of understanding painting throughout his career as an artist; with interiors, everyday scenes, in the twilight and always open to light or to nature; and still lifes with familiar and everyday objects; and many landscapes, those of his hometown of Alicante, with its mountains, terraces, rocky slopes, the Rock of Ifach sinking in the sea, but also those in which the hand of man can be seen, where countryside and city merge in gardens and orchards; and, as could not be otherwise, the trees—pine trees, black poplars, palm groves, fruit trees—he depicted so affectionately.