Dancing Ostrich
from Walt Disney's
Fantasia, 1995.
Dancing Ostrich
from Walt Disney's
Fantasia, 1995.
Island of the Lights
from Pinocchio, 1996.
The Blue Fairy
Whispers to
Pinocchio, 1996.
Paula Rego. Photo
by Jane Brown.
Dancing Couple from
Walt Disney's
Fantasia, 1994-95
Snow White and her
Stepmother, 1995
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paula rego:
new work
at marlborough
by David Cohen
Last spring Paula Rego participated in
"Spellbound: Art and Film," a group
exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery
marking the centenary of the movies. In a
show dominated by young neo-conceptualists
working mostly in photo-based media--things
like Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, a
slow-motion playback of Hitchcock's
legendary shower scene--Rego's figurative
pastels were a forceful reminder that
cinema does not discriminate on the basis
of technique or approach when it wields its
magic spells on the consciousness of
artists. Rego's entry was her series of
"Ostrich Women." As a girl growing up in
Portugal during World War II she had been
both mesmerized and terrorized by Disney
films. A scene that especially stood out in
her memory, and which coincidentally fitted
her preoccupations at the time she was
approached to show in "Spellbound," was the
Dance of the Ostriches in Fantasia. Further
works from this series were concurrently
featured at the Saatchi Gallery. Some new
pastels--most of her pastels are on paper
mounted on aluminum, although some are on
canvas--along with examples from the
Saatchi Collection and one piece loaned
from the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester,
are now the subject of an exhibition at New
York's Marlborough Gallery. This show,
which continues Rego's "dialogue with
Disney," as art historian Marcia Pointon
calls it in her astute catalog essay, is
the artist's first solo show in New York
since 1985.
The scale of these pastels is remarkable: a
typical piece is 59 x 59 inches. From a
distance, the modeling and crosshatching is
as vibrant and crystalline as the glowing
color. Closer up, the graphically and
chromatically bold marks begin to disengage
from the muscle and tone they demarcate, to
take on a formal life of their own. In this
respect, Rego's technique could not be more
radically removed from the transparency
demanded by animation. Actually, there is
nothing in the appearance of her images to
pinpoint Disney as the source of
inspiration, although the hallmarks of
Rego's strident realism are bold, emphatic
outlining and tight, fastidiously achieved
fleshtones--which sounds like animation,
even if it doesn't look like it.
In her early work Rego went in for faux naif
jumbles of cartoon-like figures that owed
something to Dubuffet and outsider art,
whereas, ironically, it is now that she is
far more of a traditional, old masterly
painter that Rego is dealing thematically
with her childhood relationship with
cartoons. A throwback to her earlier style
is the grotesque, densely all-over drawing,
Island of the Lights from Pinocchio (1996),
selectively monochrome and colored-in,
which recalls Goya with its fiercely
caricatural asses and centaurs. (Goya is
clearly invoked in Rego's etchings,
examples of which are on view at
Marlborough).
Rego offers a disconcerting combination of
a realism that is voyeuristic in its
observational intensity and a sense of
masquerade that challenges attitudes
towards the female body and role playing--
Lucian Freud meets Cindy Sherman! The
figures that cavort to the movements of
Disney's idealized cartoon characters in
Rego's giant pastels are stocky, Iberian,
coarse-featured and by no means of Sleeping
Beauty or Snow White tenderness and
demeanor: the principal model looks to be a
woman in her 40s. In working through her
childhood memories of Disney within the
praxis of her current preoccupations,
rather than simply revisiting these classic
movies with nostalgic adult eyes, Rego is
able to produce mythic compositions that
belie sentimentality.
Actually, what she does is to reconstitute
the ambiguous aspects of folklore which
Disney tends to dilute or condense in his
renderings. As for the transcriptions from
the Dance of the Ostriches--the most
ambitious images in this show--the artist
was struck, in her researches, by the fact
that Disney's draftsmen had real female
dancers pose for the original sketches.
Disney's mocking humor is thrown back at
him by these real, heavy-limbed women
crammed into improbably tight tutus and
bulging bodices. The model's sense of
awkwardness is accentuated by Rego's
robust handling of pose and depth. When
discomfort is shared in equal measure by
model, artist and viewer alike, the effect
can be sublime.
Paula Rego: New Work
December 3, 1996 - January 4, 1997
Marlborough Gallery, Inc.
40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.
DAVID COHEN is a London-based art critic
who writes for Art in America, Sculpture
Magazine and the British national press.
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