Histórias de todos os dias | Paula Rego, anos 70

During the 1969 and 1970's, Paula Rego began an illustrative process on childhood and family memories that was based on a psychological analysis of the relationships of “domination” that took different forms.

These are the “everyday stories”, as the artist identifies them, recorded in a series of Chinese ink drawings. They take place in a delimited geography, at Estoril, which is funneled into the domestic space where the most important events in life take place: birth, playing with other children, tantrums, visits and family relationships, and in which the dominance of the father figure in Portuguese patriarchal society is sometimes evidenced.

These moments of everyday life are, however, filtered by a dreamlike configuration that is frequently eroticized and linked to psychoanalysis, sometimes approaching a surrealist aesthetic.

Political events are also the target of Paula Rego's critical and at times caricatured gaze, whose drawings — such as The Candidate, Simulacro and The Race to the Ballots, October 1969 — reveal the atmosphere lived during the October 1969 elections for the National Assembly, the first ones carried out in the period known as Primavera Marcelista (room 1).

 

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