Everything Varlin paints is a portrait, whether it be of people, buses, asylums, barracks, or even a public toilet, wrote the Swiss writer and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. He was portrayed multiple times by his friend Varlin. Additionally, Dürrenmatt had the monumental work of the artist "The Salvation Army" in his study in Neuchâtel, which he viewed daily. Varlin, born Willy Guggenheim in Zurich in 1900, received his artistic training in Paris and returned to Switzerland in 1932. Within his generation, Varlin was among the artists who remained true to the subject even in the age of abstraction. Forty years after his death, this publication examines the work of an artist for whom painting was not a representational but a descriptive process that unfolded in dialogue with the motif. Varlin.