An unnerving observer of the human condition
Paula Rego wouldn’t know how to paint a boring picture if she tried. A retrospective for the 86-year-old at Tate Britain showcases her superb skills as a storyteller. She summons up worlds that are dark, disturbing and, one might even say, surreal were it not for the fact that they draw inspiration from aspects of her own life.
These aspects include the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in her native Portugal (Rego moved to
England aged 16), and her three-decade marriage to British artist Victor Willing, which was marked by affairs and his long, fatal struggle with multiple sclerosis.
In The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), a girl intensely polishes a long, black boot. It belongs to her father – so is she just conforming to age-old gender expectations? Or is the way she thrusts her arm deep inside the boot a call for female, sexual empowerment?
Like Lucian Freud, Rego is an unflinching observer of the human condition, albeit from a female perspective.
Across her career, Rego’s subjects have had body parts slightly bigger or slightly smaller than is normal. This isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it does add to a sense of the unnerving.
In Untitled, painted shortly before Willing’s death, she goes so far as to imagine her husband and herself as a dog and a little girl respectively. The chain she places around the tired canine’s neck seems painfully symbolic.
Rego was made a
DBE in 2010, but her work is anything but Establishment.