The Londoner who never stopped telling Portugal on screen
“I don’t like getting old, it’s an obscenity. I’m ashamed, but it has to be.” In an interview with DN 25 years ago, Paula Rego admits to Ana Marques Gastão how much she cost over the years. Even because she said she saw life “with euphoria”, “eating, of everything”, “working, above all”. Again and again in the studio she was happy, especially in the afternoon. “It’s a happiness to be able to work. Imagine someone my age with nothing to do… I’m a lucky person.” Maria Paula Figueroa Rego, who died on Wednesday morning (8) at her home in London, aged 8, continues to do what we love the most, including with statements of abortion and excision policies in creations without stories behind the images – an exception to his method -, while the recognition of his work is amplified and the honors have multiplied.
In the past, the Tate Gallery, the city where he lived for more than half of his life, was given a retrospective of London. to The Guardian was excited for the inauguration. “I never thought I’d live to see that day.” After his past in The Hague, an exhibition is now at the Picasso Museum in Malaga, where the artist is presented with an “extraordinary imagination that has redefined figurative art and revolutionized the representation of women”.
An only child, Paula Rego grew up between Estoril and Ericeira and kept happy memories, as well as the fears found in the garden. Still 16 years old, his father, “a man who admired Eça de Queirós” and conveyed to him principles “such as freedom and respect for others”, in addition to saying that “this country is not for women”, referring to the conservatism oppressive of Salazar society, sends her to London.
Having shown early artistic talent, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts Slade. “It was still someone, according to the artist, but very generous”, said Paula Rego of that, characteristics that she inherited privately with.
“It’s all physical. There’s nothing more physical than pastel, which is made with many, many scratches. You draw it over and over until you can barely grab it, have to paint over it and start all over again.” Paula Rego
It was in London that more English children would come, the artist Victor Willing seven years old, and with English citizenship, although he said he was a Londoner and would not come – and with whom he would have three years, Caroline, Victoria and Nick. With their children, the couple settled in Ericeira and, in 1963, Paula Rego received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, an important step forward. Until 1976, the year in which she would return permanently to the English capital, living between Portugal and England.
“I don’t paint in oil and a painter who doesn’t paint in oil is not serious. I’m not a painter, what I do is drawing.” Paula Rego
Filmmaker, the youngest of the experiments of the documentary Paula Rego Histórias & Segredos, more premiered in 2017. A look at the parents’ relationship, such as financial and health difficulties why the parents of the mother’s depression told by her own. But about Victor Willing there is only praise. “My husband was an extraordinary person, extremely intelligent, and he knew about painting, he taught me many things”, she told DN.
To Paula Rego, her husband left a letter in which he said: “Trust in you and she will be your best friend.” In the same year that Vic died, the painter, then 53 years old, saw her first major solo exhibition materialize at the Serpentine Gallery.
Even the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Santiago da Espada (2004) or the Dama of the Order of the British Empire (2010) or seeing a museum open in her honor (Casa das Histórias, in Cascais, 2009) Paula Regoia her inspired work in her life and in stories, many of them from traditional tales, but also, for example, in the cinema of whom she was a voracious spectator. “For me, painting is not decorative. There is always something behind it that has to do with what happens between people. I like, for example, to paint shame, things that are hidden”, he told DN in 1999. .
“Paintings are always very perverse because they look for things we don’t want and the figures have a personality of their own and they start doing things that don’t deviate.” Paula Rego
At that stage he was working on his untitled series on abortion, a topic that was particularly sensitive to him. “This one came out of my indignation. But all this comes from the totalitarian times that Portugal lived, of masked women with aprons making cakes like good housewives,” she said.
As the free spirit that he was, he showed his contempt for “all forms of maintaining moral strength and persecution”. As women are the central figure in her figuration, for Agustina Bessa-Luís Paula Rego’s painting was not feminist, as she emphasized in the book like girls.
“[Vejo a morte] Like a skeleton with a sheet on top.” Paula Rego
The Portuguese President, who immediately reacted to the artist’s death, said that the retrospective on display in Malaga “could hopefully end in Portugal”.
About the painter’s work, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said: “To a convulsive figuration, in the British style (or had not the artist lived for decades in the United Kingdom, in dialogue with the trends of her time and her cultural space), was added another look, another imaginary, dark and oppressive, or mythical and indomitable, a personal vision, naturally, but a Portuguese vision. youth, archetypes, trauma or nostalgia.”
The governments of Portugal and the United Kingdom also mourned the death of the artist, with the Portuguese executive having decreed a day of national mourning, which will coincide with the funeral.
Gal Rui Brito from Galeria 11, director in Lisbon, who in the past organized an exhibition with 27 contemporary artists, Paula Rego designed “the greatest figure in art”.