Paula Rego-Telling Tales

Paula Rego's work embodies a narrative impulse and underline the self subversive aspects of storytelling.It evokes pastness as a trace an indexical physical vestige .It probes Protugese iconography probing the visual culture that informs her childhood.It brings into focus something that is hidden but not entirely forgotten. Rego invokes not only the convulated routes of historigraphy but also the circuitous chronologies in a scene of psychoanalysis.In their unfolding the narratives bring into the analytic arena animate an anteriority immersed in immediacy where current action stands in place of a muffled memory.If for Freud the uncanny the unheimlich is the name for everything that is unremembered but not forgotten that ought to have remained a secret and hidden but has instead come to light ,then unnervingly its opposite, the heimlich or homely is the condition in which all that is secret and hidden must persist so.The homely is the breeding place of secrets.And with secrets come allainces, collusions.Concealment and disclosure sanction and reward coercion and betrayal these are plotted in the home, in the private realm of domesticity, and their intertwinement and articulation map the subject's relation to its primary caretakers and via them more abstractly to love and authority.Rego's figures also perform a political drama .Here we see the staging of the relationship of subordinates to superiors , a relationship that, in Rego's work, paradoxically both endorses and reverses traditional gender roles.Conversely the political finds its most apposite setting in the intimate relationship between two or three people.Many of Rego's works are staged in a domestic interior and poses questions such as-"what is it like to be submissive or subversive, obidient or rebellious as a citizen as a mother or daughter or a wife or a lover".Rego satirises and avenges in her political works in the tableaux of domestic revenge.

In the work "Girl Shaving a Dog"  Rego explored the possibilities of aggression underpinning acts of nuturing.Disgust and anger lurk behind her manifest disposition of patience and compassion. The dog extending his neck to the shaving blade is exposed and vulnerable, at the mercy of his carer's clemency.For her part she is a scarcely disguised bearer of aggression  transforming the acts of nursing, feeding and shaving into preludes to murder.

The objective of psychoanalysis to to bring what is unconscious into conciousness and the objective is to delve into the unconscious of Rego's work not only her personal unconscious but the historical and ideological forces that work behind the scenes.

Many of Rego's images are drawn from a common cultural reservoir .The importance of existing narratives stories, opera plots, poems, fairy tales , novels -standing in relation to pretext of her works reveals the extent to which her paintings, drawings, and graphic work relate to a textual order.Intertextuality differs from iconography in disallowing source to stand as origin, emphasizing the extent to which verbal or visual texts are cross fertilized by other textual material both at the point of production and reception.To view an image intertextually is to deconstruct antecedence itself.It is to disallow the present from enshrining the past as complete, ready-made and already given. In interviews Rego has always insisted that she looks for inspiration to popular sources to the marginal and the outcast and never to the canonical to the Old Masters .

For Paula Rego a pictorial narrative is ratified by its rendering of specific settings from childhood and the country of her birth has remained insistently present in all her work.She proclaims an allegiance with a narrative told from the sidelines with historians of everyday life.In a world of unmastered fluidity girls, vegetables, animals cavort with malicious pleasure  intermingle and are mutually transformed into polymorphous hybrids.In a way these works spill directly from an uncensored imagination an extraordinary idiosyncratic vision.Her works break down boundaries between inside and the outside of the personal body announcing instability of the social body at large.It smudges distinctions a leak between boundaries and heralds a collapse of hierarchy and meaning.

Paula Rego "Girl Shavin a Dog", 1986


Reference-
LOVE AND AUTHORITY IN THE WORK OF PAULA REGO, Narrating the family romance-Ruth Rosengarten