Paula Rego (1935–2022) is one of the most well-known contemporary Portuguese artists worldwide. She lived and worked in London, where she studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1952 and 1956. Her artistic training at this school was instrumental in stimulating a line of research and the subsequent search for and discovery of a personal figurative language, which was defined by the stories and images of her childhood and her country. However, the fundamental principle of her creative process does not derive from her academic training but rather from her imagination, which is the basis of her artistic identity. The development of figuration through fantasy interested the artist from an early age, and explains her early interest in surrealism, having found in this artistic movement a form of expression very similar to her personal imagery. In his words: «There were art books at home. My father gave me books after seeing that this was what interested me. When he was 14, he bought me a book about Dada and Surrealism. It was like a storybook; simply wonderful, looking at those illustrations. I can’t say it was a revelation, because for me it was exactly like a book of fairy tales. It didn’t surprise me. I was used to images like that.

This exhibition brings together works by the artist that are close to the surrealist universe due to their themes and working methodologies. Traces of the movement founded by André Breton can be identified in her works, perhaps most evident in the “collage paintings” of the 1960s. These traits are revealed in a more generalized way when the construction of the images obeys an impulse that is typical of dreams, in a constant game of dissimulation and revelation. The fantastic creatures that populate some of the works presented and the way they interact also refer to a dreamlike universe, a dream world of magnetic enchantment into which we are irremediably drawn. The dreamlike, the marvelous, the enigmatic and the mysterious are always present when you create situations of enchantment. These can be defined as images of what cannot be explained in naturalistic terms and arise when the artist deals with themes such as love, fear and mysteries.

It is in this context of enchantment that the humanized animals that coexist in her works emerge, placed in situations of power and seduction, assuming the form of benign and, at other times, frightening creatures. The idea of ​​metamorphosis also serves as an analogy for artistic creation: “All my work has to do with metamorphosis.It emerges in the very physical creation of the painting, in the trial and error of the work.”