On exhibition

Dreams and metamorfoses. The Surrealism of Paula Rego

Paula Rego (1935-2022) is one of Portugal’s most renowned contemporary artists. She lived and worked in London, where she studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1952 and 1956. Her artistic training at the Slade was decisive in nurturing a line of enquiry and in prompting the consequent search for, and discovery of, a personal figurative language shaped by the stories and images of her childhood and her country. However, the cornerstone of her creative process does not lie in her academic training, but in her imagination, which forms the foundation of her artistic identity. From early on, she was fascinated by the development of figurative imagery through fantasy, which explains her early interest in surrealism. She found in this artistic movement a mode of expression that closely resonated with her own personal imagery. In her own words:

“There were art books at home. My father gave me books when he realised that this was what interested me. When I was 14, he bought me a book about Dada and Surrealism. It was like a storybook; it was just marvellous, looking at those illustrations. A revelation, I can’t say it was, because for me it was exactly like a book of fairy tales. I wasn’t surprised. I was used to images like those.”

This exhibition brings together works by the artist that are close to the surrealist universe, both in their themes and working methods. Traces of the movement founded by André Breton can be identified in her work, perhaps most evident in the ‘collage paintings’ of the 1960s. These traces are more broadly revealed when the construction of her images follows a dream-like impulse, characterised by a continual interplay of concealment and revelation. The fantastic creatures that populate some of the works on display, and the ways in which they interact, also evoke an oneiric universe ¾ a dream world of magnetic enchantment that draws us in irresistibly. The oneiric, the marvellous, the enigmatic and the mysterious are ever-present when she creates scenes of enchantment. These may be defined as images of what cannot be explained in naturalistic terms, emerging when the artist deals with themes such as love, fear, and mysteries.

It is within this context of enchantment that her humanised animals appear, often placed in positions of power and seduction, taking on forms that are both benign and at times frightening. The idea of metamorphosis also serves as an analogy for artistic creation:

“All my work has to do with metamorphosis. It comes about in the very physical creation of the painting, in the trial and error of the work.”

Exhibition curation: Catarina Alfaro, Marlene Oliveira e Perfecto E. Cuadrado

© Paula Rego by Nicholas Sinclair