Enamoured

I am totally enamoured with the art of Paula Rego, who died last year. Her work is real but surreal and yet it comes alive in its sheer physicality. Her subject matter –people in all sorts of situations domestic and mythical—doesn’t waver from a truth, even if it’s not always clear what the truth is (isn't that a thing?). Her technique is sublime and her compositions are careful but coyly haphazard. She had a room to herself at last year’s Venice Biennale—and demonstrated that ‘traditional art’ can hold its own against the post-conceptual newcomers. The picture below, Angel in its very title captures the ambivalence that inhabits so much of her work. It’s worked in her oft-used medium of pastel, which from a purely technical point of view I am sure would have left Rembrandt speechless.

Paula Rego Angel, in Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Portugal