Paula Rego, Creatures (1981), via Victoria Miro
The 1980’s was a decade of creative transformation for artist Paula Rego. Moving away from a process of making collages – drawing and painting material that she would then cut up and arrange into sophisticated figurative puzzles – she began instead to engage with her childhood passion for painting as play. Working rapidly and fluidly, Rego embraced freedom as methodology, inventing a cast of humans, animals and hybrid creatures that served as fictive structures for new narratives and systems of meaning. These works serve as the cornerstone for a new show focused on the artist’s painterly compositions at Victoria Miro.
Paula Rego, Aida II (1983), via Victoria Miro
Just as collage had enabled Rego to deliver clandestine comments about society (and Portugal’s fascist regime in particular) her new, quickfire method of working, especially its use of anthropomorphism, in the framing and comment on the darker aspects of human nature without mannerism or sentimentality. Rego’s memories and experiences, aspects of loyalty, love, passion, obsession and jealousy, including the shifting dynamics that shaped her own marriage (her husband, the artist Victor Willing, was by the 1980s severely ill with multiple sclerosis) surface in works that helped her to identify her feelings for particular situations; feelings that, once established, might be transformed during the process of painting.
Paula Rego, Untitled (1983), via Victoria Miro
Rego’s works here are swirls of graphics and gestures, cartoonish figures and ensembles twisted into evocative poses. Forms are presented in equal measure vulnerable and comic, with poses that express vulnerability and intense emotional states, while other figures and faces conjure comical, playful understandings. Of particular note is her interpolation and reinterpretation of the work of Henry Darger, his otherworldly Vivian Girls, and the balance of violence and otherworldly confusion that the artist’s tales inspire.
Paula Rego, Letting Loose (Installation View), via Victoria Miro
Completed in 1983, Rego’s Opera paintings tap into an earlier experience of visiting the Lisbon opera house with her father in the 1950s – and her excitement at the intrigue and scandal unfolding both onstage and off. The dramas of Verdi or Janáček mingle with those of Rego’s own life in frieze-like works; works she referred to as ‘the so-called operas’ because they were as much about her relationships as those enacted on stage. Understanding this juxtaposition of the personal and the universal as posed through classical forms, the show underscores Rego’s reach beyond herself to find her way back in.
The show closes November 11th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Paula Rego at Victoria Miro [Exhibition Site]
