Paula Rego, a prospective retrospective: Bodies, Visuality, Becoming

Abstract

This research analyses the visual work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese artist based in London. The visual corpus taken as a research material comprises Rego's creations since the eighties until her more recent work. It is in the eighties, with, among others, the Girl and Dog series (1986), that female subjectivity becomes the centre of her creative activity. This project is set under two communicating movements or directions; one which allows to trace back specific and crucial moments in Rego's work, as well as providing a tool regarding its critical reception. Secondly, it opens up possible directions of her work in terms of the visual reformulation, rather than representation, of female subjectivity through the visual. This project's main argument is that Paula Rego's work functions as a visual body of feminist theory. In other words, without the explicit aim of illustration and without the determinism of an influential mechanism, Rego's work places fundamental questions in terms of a definition of female subjectivity within the plane of the visual. It traces specific modes and moments in which this artist revisits a certain visual representation of female subjectivity, allowing for degrees of difference to be installed in it. Rego goes from jamming the mechanisms of representation; to the exposure of subjection and possibilities of resistance; to, finally, transforming the concept of subjectivity itself. In this path, Rego makes visible the power relations between image and spectator and opens up other possibilities within the scopic regime