– Paula Rego and the Crime of Father Amaro –

Analysing the work of Paula Regro and Crime do Padre Amaro (the Crime of Father Amaro) poses a challenge by analogy to the greatness and vastness of the author’s anthology. To reflect on the transformation of the plastic work after the literary work – a novel that marks the beginning of Realism in Portugal – and articulating it with the psychological dimension of the author represents another heuristic and immeasurable challenge.

How can art contribute to, and include human and social development in the context of mental health? How can art speak the language of a different experience and life, and how can it represent the qualitative difference in the way it expresses itself? How can it invoke images and the need for freedom and change that inhabit the deepest dimension of human existence? How can it bring together, and give a voice to, not just a particular group but all human beings? The affirmative nature of art, among others, has its origin in the profound affirmation of life instincts, in their fight against instinctive and social oppression (Marcuse, 2007). The truth in art is that, for the author, the world in real life is how it appears in the artwork. The way it confirms the existing reality and the beautiful appearance of freedom become the dimensions through which art transcends its social purpose and frees itself from the real universe of discourse and behaviours, maintaining its overwhelming presence. Equally, the world shaped by art is perceived as a reality that is repressed and distorted from the existing reality. This experience is mirrored in extreme situations of love, joy, gratitude, but, equally, death, aggressiveness, sexuality, guilt, frustration, and mental pain, which explode into an exiting reality on behalf of an ignored truth. The existing reality is sublimated and transformed into an artwork, liberating and validating the dreams of happiness and sadness of childhood and adulthood (Marcuse, 2007).

Freud’s definition of sublimation, from 1914, states that sublimation is a process that refers to the object-libido, and consists in the fact that the pulsion is directed to another object, distant from sexual satisfaction: in other words, in the person’s capacity to invest in artistic, intellectual, ideological, and scientific activities, or, in Freud’s own words, in “higher activities”. Sublimation would, thus, be the most appropriate defence mechanism that channels libido impulses. This is where the original impulse stops and the energy is removed in benefit of the cathexis of its substitute.

The work of art depicts reality, at the same time it denounces it (Marcuse, 2007). According to the author, the critical role of art and its contribution to freedom lies in the aesthetical form. A work of art is authentic or real not because of its content, not because of the purity of its forms, but because of its shape turned into content. Art then transmits non-communicable truths, which are forbidden and repressed in other languages, and brings the hidden reality to light. Thus, art does not reproduce what is visible. Rather, it makes things visible (Klee, 2001).

And who is the artist? He or she is the one who represents the art piece, the latter being, at the same time, his or her origin. This is a relationship that is based on a dialectics and on a reciprocity whereby one does not exist without the other, and neither can stand on its own. It is the artwork that enables the very essence of the creators and which, from this essence, needs those that safeguard it. And if art is the beginning of the work, then, in its very essence, it allows the emergence of the co-ownership that is essential for the work of those who create it and those who safeguard it (Heidegger, 2007).

Paula Rego is an amazing storyteller who uses a non-verbal language as a form of expression. As opposed to verbal language, she resorts to a universal language that is representative of the deepest and most hidden side of human condition. With her art, through drawing and painting, the author claims she does justice. She sublimates the suffering of her childhood and, later on, her rebellion regarding political and social issues, transforming her most suffered experiences into art. By resorting to her most creative personality nuclei from an early age, it is believed, she has been transforming part of her grief-ridden childhood by conferring it an aesthetical dimension.

Rego’s paintings are examples of a creating vitality. She produces a type of narrative and disquieting painting that reconstructs the power of images and illusion, fosters the dimension of fantasy, of the symbolic, of dreams and reality, and finds itself in the reality mirrored in a hard, rudimentary, and prime way. This makes her illustrative work the most genuine, but, equally, the most awesome and non-real example of the human and social condition, as the themes of her paintings illustrate. They depict a plot of distinct cultural meanings, such as order, power, authority, repression, humiliation, obedience, and subversion. According to Bessa–Luís (2008), it is a type of writing one learns about and that grows in solitude, it is an artistic world that makes room for the prolongation of childhood and fears associated with it.
Our objective is to reflect on the life and work of the author of O Crime do Padre Amaro, a contemporary artist of the post-contemporary world, and one of the most talented, imaginative, and influent painters who expresses herself through an extremely figurative, personal, intense, and profoundly experienced art.

In our view, to be able to fully understand the work of Paulo Rego, it is paramount to take into account the analysis, reflection, and work that Ruth Rosengarten has been carrying out on the painter.

The future essay has the purpose of examining and interpreting the themes contained in O Crime do Padre Amaro from the paintings created by Paula Rego. The narrating impulse and the return to childhood are omnipresent characteristics in Paula Rego’s work, which go hand in hand with women storytellers, but also with her father, the first to read Eça de Queirós to her. By paying homage to her father in her series O Crime do Padre Amaro, on the one hand the artist dares to re-examine the patriarchal order, through the fracture of laws that support the western traditionally stance on art, and, on the other, through the irony and humour represented by the breaking of the rules, rebellion, and the transgression of order. From an early point, in a clear disrespect for the origins of erudite art, she advances a stylistic and iconographic stance in what concerns authority figures. Thus, the artist resorts to comedy as a form of freedom. In Freudian terms, we stand before the triumph of rebelliousness of the ego and of the principle of pleasure. The iconographic subversion and the inversion of the traditional representations of the sexual roles represent a set of weapons against the patriarchal order. Subversion assumes a most expressive dimension in the artist’s work and reaches a peak, according to Rosengarten (1999), in the set of paintings based on Eça de Queiróz’ novel O Crime do Padre Amaro. According to this author, the artist’s virtuosity is a kind of access to distinct forms of mimetic representation, through which she moves about using her chosen form of expression, and using the technical means as a form of executing her narrative purpose and psychological authenticity, as if it was a kind of insanity to cover large extensions of canvas in pastel painting. As her source, Paula Rego uses the work of an author who is part of the great literary tradition: Eça de Queiroz, a hero of Portuguese literature. O Crime do Padre Amaro, published in 1875, is a major anticlerical work that depicts, in a caustic way, the weaknesses of the small bourgeoisie of the city of Leiria, and describes the illicit love affair between a catholic priest and a young women, as well as the intrigue between priests and pious women. With a dramatic plot, Eça’s famous corrosive irony and his bare narrative call for disorder, adding to it the idea of vile and corrupt laughter. Eça portrays the separation between the two genders and the division between rationalism and faith. His themes are very close to the artist: legitimacy and paternity, love and conflict, the dignity and humiliation that passion can provoke, the ties that link men and women to the inequalities between genders, generations, and social classes, order and chaos, obedience and vexation, the quest for the truth. The search for battles, suffering, labours, and private life in society constitutes, in the light of Eça’s Realism, the matter of art itself – the naked truth. Realism is the critique of the human being, and the art that actually paints us. His process is the analysis, and his goal is the absolute truth. Realism is, thus, the ideal truth and justice, and the purpose of art should be the morals and the ethics that constitute that ideal.

Paula Rego’s work gives shape to Freud’s idea, in that incest is a return of repressed desire. By using this anti-tragic work, without punishment or guilt, the artist turns her back on the way she primitively used comedy and the grotesque, adopting something closer to the tragic genre. If Eça refused to punish Amaro and avenge Amélia, the artist will do it to honour and legitimate her woman desire, not to repair the Christian virtue of Amélia (Rosengarten, 1999).

Due to the fact that there is always a conscious or unconscious intention in the artist’s behaviour, and that mental activity has an intentional function whenever an artist paints or writes, in accordance with psychoanalytical, psychological and sociological conceptual models, and also because Paula Rego’s art has an extraordinary psychological wealth, we propose writing, in the near future, an article articulating art and psychoanalysis with the objective of analysing a part of the psychological functioning of Paula Rego. This is because the painter’s work is a narrative, and psychoanalysis grows in that very same narrative, due to the fact it brings to the conscience what is unconscious, alongside dreams, obstacles, desire, and truth. Rego’s work inhabits the place where dreams reside, her narrative spilling over the entire place, where everything becomes possible, and where language takes up the place of the hidden truth.

Alexandra Sofia Santos Silva
Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon
santossilva.alexandra@gmail.com

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Bibliographic References 

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Heidegger, M. (2007). A origem da obra de arte. Lisboa: Edições 70.

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Rego, P & Bessa–Luís, A. (2008). As Meninas. Lisboa: Guerra e Paz, Editores S.A.