“In her graphic work, as in her painting, Rego is a great storyteller who both persuasively and subversively seizes you at the first encounter, and then keeps a relentless grip on your mind and senses until she has finished her complex, infinitely subtle and reverberating tales.”
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Image: Bridgeman Images
After Zurbarán is a richly layered visual narrative that epitomises Paula Rego’s exceptional draughtsmanship and unparalleled imaginative power. Part of an incisive oeuvre obsessed with chronicling the disquieting facets of human drama, the present work indisputably proves Rego’s peerless talent as an artist who transfers the winding and twisting subtleties of her psyche onto paper and canvas.
Inspired by a viewing of Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Crucified Christ with a Painter (c. 1650, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), Rego takes on the long art historical tradition of Christ on the Cross, uncompromisingly reshaping and upending the traditional narrative to make the story entirely her own. Offering more questions than answers, the ambiguous mise-en-scène is draped in a haunting sense of menacing mystery. Meaning is malleable, incongruous and fluid, Rego takes on the role of the narrator and we are her attentive listeners. Drawing the viewer in, Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou pointedly described Rego’s caustic narrative inventions as “familiar [stories] made unnervingly unfamiliar” (Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, ‘Cruel To Be Kind’, Women: A Cultural Review, 2019, online). Rego, a candid storyteller, reframes the ca. 1650 original, in which, painted against a sombre background, a male artist with palette and brushes looks upon the crucified Christ. Instead, in After Zurbarán characters elude immediate identification, as Marco Livingstone writes:
“[Christ is replaced with] no intentional blasphemy, by a bony elderly woman with sagging breasts and a diaper-like loin cloth; forlorn and humiliated, she is gazed at pityingly but also with a dry-eyed curiosity, by a clothed and healthy younger woman who stands in both for St Luke the Painter and for Rego herself.”
Rego then skilfully plays with the underlying symbolic complexities of the original work, re-inventing and confronting the biblical narrative with a subversive eye and a long-held interest in devising sinister fictions. Ultimately, the viewer is tasked with making sense of it all, as the artist says, “that’s the wonderful thing about pictures, you can always make up your own story” (Paula Rego quoted in: Exh. Cat., Plymouth, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Paula Rego: Tales from the National Gallery, 1991, p. 17). After Zurbarán is a highly emblematic work within Rego’s oeuvre, which captures both her enigmatic and exuberant painterly iconography as well as her interest in popular narratives and the dramatic existential battles they represent.