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Secret pain of Paula Rego
Viewpoint
Wednesday September 3rd 2008
Artist Paula Rego spares no misery in a series of engravings currently exhibiting at the art school in Nîmes. Philippe Dagen reports in Le Monde
Wednesday September 3rd 2008
Feeding Time by Paula Rego. Photograph: Marlborough Fine Art Ltd
Paula Rego is nothing like as well known in France as she is in Britain, where she now lives, or Portugal, where she was born. This is the first time she has had a show on this scale in France, which is all the more surprising given that she was born in 1935 and has featured in a string of personal exhibitions, as well as taking part in events such as the São Paulo and Venice biennials and publishing widely, as might be expected of someone of her age and repute.
Eager to repair this omission, Nîmes art school is showing almost all of her engraving work, more than 200 prints from 1954 to the present day. This is a fine initiative and should prompt a retrospective of her paintings. Books partly explain some of her inventions. Rego devoted a series of prints to Peter Pan, another to Edgar Allan Poe’s evil raven. She knows Lewis Carroll by heart and the set of lithographs inspired by Jane Eyre in 2002 goes way beyond the novel in its exploration of the grotesque, overwhelmingly ugly and mournfully desperate.
What Rego primarily seeks to convey as directly as possible is her fear and disgust at the world of today, with all its deceitful evasion and secret pain. The abortion series inflicts repeated blows, sparing no misery. The artist justifies such hardness on moral and political grounds inspired by her feminism.
It is difficult to admit that some of the scenes depict families. The relations between adults and children seem to hinge on threats and punishment, forcible communion, literally devouring embraces and perhaps even crimes. Are these young women asleep, or dead?
It is all too easy to guess what becomes of children’s stories and dreams in such society, bringing Annette Messager to mind. The two artists use different means but the sacrilegious penetration and irony are comparable. Which makes it all the more incomprehensible that the French should know so little about Rego.
• The exhibition at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts continues until September 21.
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