2024-10-12 11:13:00
Portuguese painter Paula Rego died two years ago. His images of macho men, defensive women and family constellations have yet to find a wider audience. Why his mysterious work is still worth discovering.
It has been on display for a long time. Images, foreign, closed, resistant, as if defending themselves from the grasp of understanding. You walk away from them and come back anyway. He is faced with the “cadet and his sister”. And who will reveal now what they have together?
The young man on the stone bench, clean uniform, white gloves, dreams of appearance, power, probation, victory, who knows. The sister in the red dress has put down her purse, is crouching down and tying her shoes. It’s like that between brother and sister. Is that so?
You can’t ask Paula Rego. The Portuguese painter has never spoken much about her paintings. He is not known to have commented on his own work as confidently as his German colleagues Daniel Richter or Albert Oehlen. Even the numerous self-portraits around which the impressive exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel is grouped refuse to provide information and hide, so to speak, behind their masks.
Paula Rego never truly belonged
Especially because one can hardly be sure that the “self-portrait” is not a rented portrait of his favorite model, Lila Nunes. Caring for her sick husband had become a kind of alternative self for the artist: “I can project myself onto her, I can use her to create an image of the things I want to represent.”
When the artist died two years ago in London, where he had lived most of his life, his work was still shrouded in mystery that never made him truly popular. International recognition has not been lacking, but it has never truly entered the mold of success of contemporary art. Furthermore, this figure painting lacked the progressive design.
And it is precisely the suspicion that Paula Rego’s scenes may concern power-based relationships that has deprived them of their ability to attract the public. The fact that the sister and the cadet are not exactly seen taking care of the family is something that anyone who does not want to discover an avenging angel in the diabolical red-clad shoemaker can guess.
A work of rare intensity. These paintings and pastel drawings always appear as sketches of a story that has yet to be told. Like drama commercials where you never know exactly which act you’re in.
What happens when a mother and teenage daughter gleefully lunge at the apparently defenseless father and tear off his dress? While the little girl stands at the window and happily considers herself part of the abusive “family”? And what about the quiet moonlit night when people gather to dance on the illuminated shore?
Mother and daughter, couples and a woman swinging alone at an imperceptible rhythm. A strange dreamlike atmosphere permeates all these scenes, as if they had not yet completely gone through the process of becoming aware. It’s as if they still hold a dreamlike residue mixed with foreboding, suspicion, defense and fear.
This is incredibly fascinating. And it gives the work, as is only now fully clear, a unique status. No one has painted like Paula Rego in recent decades, focusing so much on the content and at the same time refusing to interpret it.
With the skill of the figure painter, who in her own way has never had modern scruples, who has never worried about whether it was possible to paint pictures and how it was still possible to paint pictures. Without looking at the changes in the drawings over the years, without considering the customs, the decorative “state of the art”, the painter accompanied her life, intertwined in her secret figurative appearances.
Power games at the Kunstmuseum Basel
An attempt was made to divide the work and separate the obviously political reflections from the family constellations, as if Paula Rego had increasingly withdrawn from political discourse into her private world. It wasn’t particularly successful. The artist never forgot her memories of fascist Portugal, where she was born and raised in 1935.
And the brutal military macho, who helped achieve a strange visual dignity in 2000 (“The Interrogator’s Garden”), has faceless predecessors who frame his female torture victim in 1950 (“Interrogator”). The sensitivity to violence remains evident throughout the work. And it stands to reason that experiences of male domination provided at least as much inspiration for Paula Rego’s painting as female defense strategies.
There was almost no repetition and, overall, there was never a return to the variant. The painter retained a rare will to invent well into old age and repeatedly rejected Rego’s “typical” disposition. In addition to the harshness of the new lens, there are also surreal collages and, if the drawing of the figure did not promise enough suggestion, it could sometimes turn into a fabric sculpture.
No less surprising is the occasional desire for caricature, for wanton destruction of the face. Particularly emphatic in a series in which the painter devotedly mistreated herself and disfigured herself after falling down the stairs.
It is therefore part of the reality of the art industry that it is worth considering that this work has only received widespread attention since its honorary presentation in the year of the artist’s death at the Venice Biennale in 2022. It will probably never be a matter of the heart. But the fact that it lasts a long time, that you have to detach yourself from these images, strange, closed, resistant as they are, and yet they keep coming back, that’s how it is.
“Paola Rego. power games”until 2 February 2025, Kunstmuseum Basel
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