Paula Rego and a Necessarily Messy Take - Meanderings (IV)

The Tate Britain's 2021 retrospective of the Anglo-Portuguese artist Paula Rego has long since closed. Thoughts churning excitedly around my head as I passed through each of the rooms, the plan was to write about it straight after visiting. And yet, when I sat down to organise those thoughts, I found that they would not coalesce or come close to making sense. I kept coming back to it, but all I could gather together was a jumble of impressions, a barely coherent stream of consciousness that read like a furious note-taking exercise. 

Yet a month after the exhibition closed, here was London's Victoria Miro Gallery showing a much smaller Rego exhibition just ten minutes walk from my office. Perhaps this would provide the cerebral glue for my disconnected ramblings. The Forgotten - a selection of around ten of Rego's works from the 21st Century - focused me immediately. Arranged around the subjects of depression and illness and their impact upon parents and children, I began to look and think about the paintings in a more concentrated manner. And so it was, that standing in the middle of the cold, spare space of the Victoria Miro Gallery, I made the conscious decision to dwell on just one piece of work, seeking out whatever it was that resonated most strongly. Discarding any thoughts of the Tate retrospective, and honing in on those stated themes, I looked closely at Convulsion IV.

Convulsion IV (2000)

In doing just that, I was able to isolate just what it is that leaves you feeling so unsettled about Rego's work, and when taken in multiple doses, what it is that can be so overwhelming. Here my first thought was filial cruelty: how we treat slowly but irrevocably ageing parents. Initially, the gaze of the young girl seems indifferent to the plight of the older figure convulsing on the floor. Yet look at the way that the young girl's incongruous shoes - both sexually spiteful and playground sensible - echo the legs of the armchair. See the unmistakable smile apparent in the pinioned fabric of the back of the chair; the young girl may grimace only slightly, but there is clear pleasure here for her. There is no doubt about it, she's culpable. We all are. The painting seems to invite us to condemn, and in doing that, asks us to question our own responsibilities.  

Ten minutes later, and I was still looking at this one work, its relatively simple wax crayon lines resonating both darkly and fiercely. I left the gallery with a sense that I could come at my Rego piece afresh. Perhaps I just needed to isolate each of the images and the impressions that I had collected, and think about them with as little regard as possible to Rego's wider opus. Even to jettison the biography and to approach each painting instantly and objectively. Easier said than done, of course. 

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Back in early autumn, it was quite startling to encounter an artist who pursues a creative trajectory that moves towards the figurative rather than away from it. Indeed, although the first three rooms of Rego's Tate retrospective were dominated by a wearisome tendency towards busy collages, or vast, impenetrable doodles, there was still a grand sense of something systematic developing. Especially when on entering the fourth room, you found yourself greeted by the paradoxical warmth and disquiet of The Dance. 

The Dance (1988)

The painting is dreamlike and swiftly draws you in. But then those faces, initially soft and bland, penetrate deeper, and that sense of disquiet starts to dominate. If we weren't aware of it, we've already been primed through the exhibition's commentary of the violence and fascism of Salazar's Portugal in the twentieth-Century (you see what I mean about the difficulty of escaping biography). But even without that knowledge, you might feel uneasy. There's an arresting unknowability about the subjects and what they are thinking here. I've strived to isolate these gazes, remove them from the whole, but I remain puzzled. What exactly is it that is being communicated to us through the gaze of the two figures who stare directly back at us, the woman and the man? Suspicion, shame, or concentration? Perhaps I've been thinking about painting and the 'gaze of the subject' too much lately. Reading T J Clark's dense and thorough overview of a handful of Velázquez portraits in the London Review of Books recently, had been a real lesson on just how futile and slippery it can be to pin down a sense of what is going on in the mind of the subject. For example, Clark's attempts to burrow into the mindset of an unmanned Mars, disturbed post-coitally - Clark convincingly suggests that he's covering up his modesty with Venus's discarded nightwear - are foiled at every turn. What is it that we read in that shadowy face? Indifference? Shame (again)? A readiness to aggressively confront the voyeur (ourselves)? Take a look.  

Velázquez's, Mars Resting, (1640)

The eyes of Mars, hidden beneath the brow of his helmet, remind me of the direct gaze of the man in The Dance. And not for the first time, I find myself not quite buying into the cliche that the eyes are the windows to the soul. There are, of course, hints in the notes that accompany The Dance: the artist herself features twice; likewise, her husband Victor Willing. But for me there would be something overly reductionist about using the artist's key. Remember, I want to try and revisit these works independently of the biography and Rego's wider oeuvre.  

The Dance dominates this space, but it was the much more focused Soldier and his Sister that caught my eye next. Or rather, the two faces, one revealed, one half-hidden: the sister's, downcast and resigned; the soldier's, catatonic and childlike. Indeed, a small preparatory sketch for this painting on the centre-table suggests the bulbous head of a toddler rather than a young man. Men are primed for violence, women to be helpmates, their emotions mere collateral to that process. The symbols are direct and don't obfuscate: a thrusting cock versus the domestic receptacle of the handbag; an avenue of trees, stretching out fatalistically to a point narrowing towards oblivion. 

The Soldier and His Sister (1988)

Back in autumn, an unsettling aside had caught me out at this point. My thoughts had veered off towards the story that was dominating the news and social media at the time, the fury aimed at Sarah Everard's murderer, a convicted Metropolitan policeman. I could not help but feel a nauseous sense of repulsion at the smug sophism of certain men commenting on the case, that 'actually, males are far more likely to be violently killed than females', deliberately burying the point that it is almost always other men that are doing the killing. The sister's resigned expression seemed to be a rejoinder to that point, an acknowledgement that yes, men will die in greater numbers than women, but also a plea to be left unharmed. 'I'll tie your laces and then let you go murder, but please leave me be!' A jump too far? Overly subjective? I think so. But then these are the places that Rego takes you.   

Despite the ambiguity of the gaze, at the heart of The Dance and The Soldier and His Sister are a simplicity that allows those paintings to breathe. Penetrating further into the exhibition, though, that relative simplicity vanished and a glorious messiness, a treasure chest of symbols and allusions - individually straightforward, but when combined bamboozling - took over. At times - and this is the danger with a painter who alludes so frequently and variously - you are lost, not from any fault of Rego, but rather the shameful realisation that you aren't quite as well-read as you'd like to think. What kind of English literature graduate hadn't read Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native?     

The Return of the Native (1993)

Staring at this painting, and feeling slightly anxious about that fact - did I tell you there's a great deal of anxiety to be felt when encountering Rego? - I needed to rectify that. I read the novel a few weeks later. The jumble of briars and the strange unsettling symbols: the two women prostrate on the floor, the doll, the red monkey - surely a cipher for Diggory Venn the meddling reddleman - it all suddenly made sense. It also served - something that I think may be sui generis - as a piece of pictorial literary criticism. Hardy's notoriously labyrinthine plots, the entanglements, the heavy lifting that gets each of his characters into exactly the right place at exactly the right time, invariably in the most unlikely of circumstances, were captured wonderfully by this gloriously messy painting. However, without knowledge of the novel it is impenetrable.

Occasionally, prior knowledge seems to initially place you on firmer ground. But when you delve deeper, thinking you have the correct tools for the job, you can still find yourself lost. Take Time - Past and Present. Here the explicit inspiration guides us back to the Renaissance and Antonella da Messina's St Jerome in His Study. Standing in the gallery, I immediately flashed up the Messina on my phone. What a time to be alive; how did those pre-smart phone gallery goers survive? 

Antonella da Messina, St Jerome in His Study (c.1474)

Time - Past and Present (1990)

Eyes flicked back-and-forth and the attempts to decipher made my brain ache and my mask irritate; at least the pre-smart phone crowd didn't have to contend with that. My reach started from a subjective place. Whenever I've stood before the Messina - it's one of my favourites in London's National Gallery, a tiny but exquisitely busy painting - I've always thought of Bede's famous analogy for the life of man. Jerome's study is no 'mead-hall' but still, the metaphor of life being indoors, and death outside, both before we are born and after we have died, is an idea that has taken firm hold. 

"The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown  to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all." 

But Rego's take confronts and obfuscates that subjective reaction. It is as if the study, or rather the homestead - a place of learning and preparation, full of stories, toys, and guiding fatherly hands - is actually somewhere we eventually leave in order to find our way into adult life. The little girl in the yellow dress, stepping out in a blank landscape, surely represents the beginning of the artistic journey. She will find her own subjects, and reject, perhaps, the choices that previous male artists might have made. That murky depiction above the door of Saint Sebastian savaged by arrows, for instance.    

Again, I started to feel like I was getting somewhere, but then a detail would send my mind scurrying off in a different direction. Look at the expression on the face of the the baby in the cot. Immediately I reached back to the faces of the protagonists of The Dance. The baby's gaze is searching. And therein, maybe, was the key to the earlier gazes: searching, but in the manner of a child. Or maybe not, as I was suddenly struck by the deeply unsettling sense, that in Rego's work children and babies are often imbued with the expressions of adults.  

What too are we to make of The Barn? Where on earth do you begin? Well, the woman replete on the mattress being flogged by two children draws the eye. But then you are almost suffocated by a cascade of images and questions. Are those children carrying out the flogging? What, if anything, is being conveyed about motherhood through that lactating cow? What do we make of those bats and the hammers and the symbol that - oddly - unsettles me the most: the cut away water melons? Like the back of the chair in Convulsion IV, they seem to have rudimentary human expressions. 

The Barn (1994)

The footholds have shifted, and the retrospective has passed a kind of sexual event horizon. Everything from now on cannot escape that thematic pull. Sex. Often violent sex. The liminal zone that lies at the edge of consensual S&M, and the murky threshold of sanctioned violence, one where safe-words are ignored, arises again and again. In The Barn that threshold is certainly crossed, but there's a rowing back in the next room which opens up a more sexually ambivalent space. Rego's work is always confrontational and eager to take on the patriarchy, but it also seems, at times, in full-blooded sexual thrall to it. The submissive female figures of Target and Bad Dog are cases in point. 

Bad Dog (1994)

Not for the first time, the biography is inescapable. It was on looking at these paintings that I recalled something that I'd read earlier about Rego's first meeting with her husband Victor Willing. Gaby Wood relates the story. 

Rego and Willing met at a house party, sometime around the coronation of Elizabeth II. He was behind her on the stairs, and guided her into a bedroom. 'Take down your knickers,' he said. It didn't occur to Rego to refuse. 'I was a virgin, so you imagine the mess,' she told their son. 'He could at least have hailed me a taxi.'

The aside about the taxi almost distracts you from the blunt brutality of the seduction, but not quite. Rego might be casually brushing off the incident, but it suddenly struck me that all of the female images that I was encountering in this exhibition were, despite their exposure, somehow still managing to keep their knickers on. A subtle, stubborn protest? Maybe.  

An in encountering Angel, the woman seems to have finally gained the upper hand. The gorgeous pastel gold of the woman's dress is a joy.  

Angel (1998)

Angel almost served as an island of calm, a moment of catching your breath in the midst of violent, sexual tumult - yes, I know she's carrying a sword - and one that allowed me to return to those earlier thoughts of Velazquez and the enigmatic gaze of his subjects. Indeed, try actually penetrating the sense of that gaze. Strange, too, looking back, that this painting still feels wonderfully still. Yet, was that what I really wanted from Rego? Perhaps not. And indeed, the next room is the most striking in the exhibition. 

The collection of seven paintings entitled Possession I-VII stops you dead. There's a simplicity to the subject, a single woman in seven different poses on the same sofa. But the reactions that the various poses engender are both complex and mesmerising: provocative, sober, inviting, flirtatious, relaxing, distressed, playful. And as your eyes roam around the three sides of the room that the seven images occupy, you change your mind over and over again. 

Possession (2004)

Possession (2004)

The room and its paintings still you. It would almost be an act of cultural vandalism to separate these paintings. They work together, like a complicated musical phrase. The warm pastels glow - orange, burgundy and gold - and there is the sense, but only through their multiplicity, of a woman's refusal to be pinned down and defined. These poses are on the woman's terms, quite different from the earlier paintings.  

There's almost a reluctance to leave this room, as a glimpse into the final spaces, shows that this sudden simplicity will disappear. Indeed, there's almost a sense of seasickness that comes with the works that you encounter next. For example, the grotesqueries of The Pillowman triptych seem to make your head buzz with noise. Too much noise. 

The Pillowman (2004)

The threshold of exhaustion had been reached. I remember a feeling of being overwhelmed, and a refusal to deal with anymore symbols. At what moment do you reach saturation point in such a comprehensive retrospective? Would it be unfair to steal back into the last room and spend more time with the woman in Possession I-VII? How, indeed, do you even begin to collect your thoughts on a body of work that can contain multitudes in a single painting? The answer, of course, was found later, and is at the beginning of this meandering and confused overview. You take an artist like Rego in small but intense doses. Exactly what was supplied at the Victoria Miro Gallery. 

One thing is for sure: Paula Rego has the ability to halt you in your tracks, draw you in, and leave you both mesmerised and bewildered. What we find in the gaze of her subjects is often puzzling and always unsettling. Knowability is absent and meaning shifts as you move your eyes - an half-smile suddenly turns sinister; a provocative pose is misread; submission seems both feared and freely given; blank gazes are brim with meaning. That is quite the artistic achievement.