Paula Rego: Folktales and fairy
tales
8 may-30 september 2018
Paula Rego's research into this rich literary universe began in
1974, when she produced a series of illustrations dedicated to
traditional Portuguese folktales. They are violent and cruel
stories, in which the artist rediscovers not only her childhood
memories but also an acute sense of fear. In 1976 she submitted an
application for a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in
which she proposed to "produce a prolific number of illustrations
of Portuguese traditional tales or integrate these timeless stories
into our contemporary mythology and personal experience through
paintings." Since then, folktales and fairy tales have been a
fertile source of inspiration for the artist's creative work.
Her approach to folktales is markedly authorial and often
self-referential. In her works, the stories - that are aligned in a
fantasy aesthetic and explore themes of enchantment, love and
seduction, power and subjugation, fear and terror, and above all
transgression - cease to be subjected to these external references,
in a clearly delineated strategy of insubmission. The tales, in
turn, gain fresh meaning through articulation, on screen or on
paper, with elements and stories from the artist's own personal
universe.
In her free interpretation of these stories, that form part of
her imaginary universe, Paula Rego introduces the voice of women,
which has always been a dominant feature of the oral tradition of
fairy tales. She is both a character and narrator of these timeless
stories, reinscribing them in her own epoch. In this process, in
which she uses painting to tell stories, we always see her
questioning, and crude and often brutal revelation of human nature
and of the relationships that people establish with each other,
whether based on family ties, love or political relations. She uses
fairy tales to reveal and, above all, deconstruct established
models of socialization and, more specifically, the roles that
society assigned to women in her epoch.
Curatorship: Catarina Alfaro e Leonor de Oliveira