.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Paula Rego’s Stretched (2009) is uncanny and unruly, a carnivalesque vision in which the children appear to overwhelm their adult minders. This is a fantastical, visceral world where safety seems uncertain and confusion reigns. Sporting wide-eyed expressions and dainty dresses, Rego’s little girls alternately menace, ogle or are held by the three adults in the picture: a witch-like schoolmistress presides over the scene as the children play among a scene of ambiguous erotic tension, with a woman straddling an armchair and a shamefaced man who has lost his belt. The adults are often complicit in the corruption of the children in Rego’s works: rich in incident and narrative asides, Stretched suggests a ritualistic unveiling in which debauchery and abasement take centre stage. ‘Paula,’ notes curator Elena Crippa, ‘takes you to uncomfortable places—Jung called it the Shadow. They are taboo areas, where love and cruelty touch each other, and our drives and fears live … Yet they’re drawn with infinite compassion. She takes us on that journey of empathy’ (E. Crippa quoted in B. D’Silva, ‘Paula Rego: The artist who helped change the world’, BBC, 13 July 2021).
Rego, who has a gallery entirely devoted to her work at the Giardini in this year’s Venice Biennale, builds her complex, layered compositions by posing dolls in her studio and basing figures off people she knows. She looks to fables, nursery rhymes, films, and the news to find narratives and backdrops and cites Max Ernst, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya as foundational influences. Yet within Rego’s world, animals, young girls, and grown women—those often overlooked by her male predecessors—play oversized parts: the female experience, with all its brutal beauty, is central to Rego’s imagery. Since the 1990s, the artist has primarily worked in pastel and Conté pencil to create compositions with such ‘physical intensity’ that they seem to make ‘bodies and faces explode off the wall’ (J. Jones, ‘Paula Rego review – phenomenal paintings, shame about the décor’, The Guardian, 5 July 2021). Her works draw their viewers into a place where pain and pleasure stand hand in hand: she explores rage and agony—especially in women—but also indulges in mischief, mockery and play. Rego reminds us all of how variable, and vast, the human condition can be.
Rego, who has a gallery entirely devoted to her work at the Giardini in this year’s Venice Biennale, builds her complex, layered compositions by posing dolls in her studio and basing figures off people she knows. She looks to fables, nursery rhymes, films, and the news to find narratives and backdrops and cites Max Ernst, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya as foundational influences. Yet within Rego’s world, animals, young girls, and grown women—those often overlooked by her male predecessors—play oversized parts: the female experience, with all its brutal beauty, is central to Rego’s imagery. Since the 1990s, the artist has primarily worked in pastel and Conté pencil to create compositions with such ‘physical intensity’ that they seem to make ‘bodies and faces explode off the wall’ (J. Jones, ‘Paula Rego review – phenomenal paintings, shame about the décor’, The Guardian, 5 July 2021). Her works draw their viewers into a place where pain and pleasure stand hand in hand: she explores rage and agony—especially in women—but also indulges in mischief, mockery and play. Rego reminds us all of how variable, and vast, the human condition can be.