Taking his surrounding environs as a pretext, Varela laid the foundation of modern painting in Alicante and succeeded in raising landscape to the category of a genre in painting in its own right. With their explosion of colour his earliest works irrupted in the midst of an otherwise provincial and academicist milieu. The artist’s traditional education and his training under Sorolla did not prevent him from paying the utmost attention to the latest evolutions in the art of his time, particularly to the modernism brought into play by Impressionism and the early avant-gardes.

His en plein air views confer a sense of dignity on the countryside of Alicante, showing the mystery of the light of his native land through compositions grounded in a contrast of colour, light and forms in quest of purely pictorial values. If we take into account the date of his works, we may safely see Varela as a precursor of the renewal of Spanish painting in the early twentieth century.

Irrigation canals and cisterns are ubiquitous in his works. Signalling man’s domination of nature, the channelling of water is deeply rooted in a culture passed down by generations of farmers ever since the time of the Moors.

With the aid of his brushwork Varela renders these exotic corners that had first begun to grow in popularity in the 19^th century through prints and engravings, and now through a lively palette that advances energetically thanks to his artistic sensibility.