Review by Paola Rego – Tantalizing drawings with shoe prints left behind | Art and design

WWhen Paola Rego was nine years old, she painted her grandmother sitting comfortably in a chair. The old woman’s hair is tied back, and she wears dangling earrings and thick-rimmed glasses on a chain. You might be reading or sewing – it’s hard to know. Whatever the case may be, she’s engrossed in the task at hand. Just like the young artist, who, even as a child, diligently signed and dated her works, in elegant calligraphy shooting from the tip of her grandmother’s shoe like a torch in the night sky.

This small, delicate drawing is part of the largest exhibition of the Portuguese-born artist’s drawings to date. The exhibition, curated by her son, Nick Welling, features works on paper dating back to the 1950s, from around the time she settled in Britain, until her death in 2022. The lines of pencil, pastel, pen and ink are tantalizing tales of people and places real and imagined, and periods in Rigo’s own life when she felt fearful, inspired or ferocious. Sometimes the stories intertwine. Sometimes they stand alone. They can be mischievous, agitated, restless. They are all full of emotions.

Created in response to the failed referendum to legalize abortion in Portugal in 1998, this is an intimate pencil drawing showing the sad and lonely aftermath of a backstreet abortion, showing a girl sitting alone in a room with her back to us, her legs crossed, her head sunk in despair. In Study for Annunciation (2002), which hangs away from the study of abortion but feels eerily connected to it, Rigo models Marie as a schoolgirl who raises her head as a huge winged angel weighs in front of her, pressing her knees together nervously.

Born in 1935, during the early years of Salazar’s dictatorship, Rego criticized the fascist regime in her art until it was overthrown in 1974. By then, she was married to fellow artist Victor Welling, and living in England; It seems that her father asked her, when she was seventeen years old, to leave Portugal, as it was not a country for women. Women were oppressed, and for the rest of her life she would rally against it.

A beautiful and poignant 2002 pastel painting from Pietà depicts the right arm of the Christ figure twice, at two different angles, as if it had flopped slightly before his death. Alongside the biblical references are literary greats: the character of Jane Eyre, who was less virtuous than powerful, as well as the young and handsome Mr. Rochester; Orpheus and the maenads, wild and free; Germaine Greer sits with her knees apart and the soles of her feet together.

It’s the little gestures that stay in my mind. Curved eyebrow. Wrinkled fingers. Infantile development of toe. Even in the most disturbing works, emotions are conveyed not through outrageous actions, but through expressions. In Rape (2009), the feeling of terror comes not from the bulk of the man pressing down on the woman lying on her back, but from the way she turns her head to one side and fixes her gaze with determination and desperation on something very far away.

Here, too, are studies of enormous paintings from the late 1980s, made while she was a caregiver to Welling, who died of multiple sclerosis in 1988. I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss the color and boldness of those paintings, the sheer scale of them, which ultimately would work best in Victoria Miró’s large, stark spaces. But there’s something about the sharp pencil lines and precise pen strokes, the pastel smudges and watercolor washes, that feels more intuitive and less effortful.

A Study of a Policeman’s Daughter (1987) shows two versions of the girl side by side, polishing her father’s shoes, with small adjustments (from slack jaw to clenched jaw; from flat foot to flexed foot) that change the mood from obedient to defiant. Study for a Soldier’s Daughter (1987) presents five penciled versions of her youthful face on a blank page, each with a gently varying smile.

Look closely at that second study and you’ll notice a fingerprint smudge, as well as shoe prints. Displayed in the closet, along with notes, letters and sketchbooks, are photographs of Rego bending over a drawing on the floor. She often worked on the floor, sometimes walking over drawings she had dropped there earlier. No wonder it’s the medium she felt most connected to.

Toward the end of the exhibition is a self-portrait of the artist in her eighties, painted in 2017. Her elderly face emerges from the page bearing two deep purple rings under her watchful eyes; Her lips parted to reveal white teeth against red gums. She is a different woman from the little girl whose grandmother painted, in a different time, and yet, she remains focused on the task at hand. Nearby, as if floating in space, there is a lone finger, perhaps holding a pastel.