Paula Rego, Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, review: Storytelling is at the heart of everything she does

The 82-year-old artist's show includes a series of five self-portraits made soon after she fell and badly damaged her face

Self Portrait III (MarlboroughFine Art)

It is good to see works, paintings and prints by Paula Rego beside the sea in Hastings, with its ear-jangling brawl of drunkenly wind-buffeted gulls, powerful fish stench – there's an impressive gaggle of fishing boats just beyond the windows of the Jerwood Gallery's café on the upper floor – and quick-uprearing headland. The place feels as tough as a weathered hide.

Rego grew up near the sea. Its rages, its up-and-back seethe, the way it seems to mimic psychological turmoil, are in her blood. The first painting by her that you see as you enter the first gallery – it's a fairly recent one, from 2014 – is called Rowing from Ericeira and it shows a small dinghy pulling away from the shore. This fragile vessel contains the second son of the King of Portugal, freshly exiled, pulling away from his ancestral homeland, with his mother collapsed like a tragic puppet at his knees.

Its story is based on real events – many of her works have begun in actuality or someone else's storytelling. In fact, storytelling is at the heart of everything she does. How much real human concern or genuine feeling can be conveyed through dashes and blobs? That is how she would readily dismiss the claims of abstract art.


 ‘The Sky was Blue the Sea was Blue and the Boy was Blue’ 
 (MarlboroughFine Art)

Rego is Portuguese by origin. She too, decades ago, pulled away from her ancestral homeland – to London. Now 82 years of age, she has had much ill health recently – she fell onto a concrete floor earlier this year, and made a terrible mess of her face. The most extraordinary paintings in this show – not shown until now – are a series of five sparely rendered self-portraits made soon after she fell.

The sight is a horrifyingly enthralling one, and it evidently fascinated her. To such an extent, in fact, that when the scabs began to heal, she picked away at them so that she could continue to portray – with great speed – this tragic vision of her barely recognisable self, punished by the violence of the impact, twisted about, bruised, gaping-mouthed, a little like a horrific vision by Francis Bacon. Is she raging against infirmity? Is she enthralled by the fact that it has engulfed her so dramatically? A little of both.


 Doll parts: one of Rego's 'dollies' with which she peoples her fantastical narratives 

The works here are brand new, newish, and older. The newest lack the facility, the sureness of touch of, for example, the marvellous prints you can see here, which are based, loosely, on Jane Eyre or Peter Pan. These prints, often darkly, jaw-clenchingly sinister, are her greatest works. They suck in everything that she has learnt from such masters as Dore, Dubuffet, Goya, Ensor.

Two paintings were finished a matter of weeks ago. 'Split' is a vision of a pair of suspended, doll-like presences who hang beside a fat-headed, blade-wielding male with a shock of corn-yellow hair. As so often, it seems to have swum out of a deep-rooted world of secretive, folkloric nursery storytelling. It feels like a swarming, unnervingly somnambulistic re-imagining of which the artist needed to rid herself.

One of the pleasures of the show is that it includes some of the objects from the studio with which she peoples her fantastical narratives – her 'dollies'. Often gruesome, they include a stringy, headless girl, a withered bird with gorgeous yellow claws, and a pair of flying mer-creatures (to call these high-in-the-air-suspended phantoms of our worst nightmares mermaids or mermen would be to tame them needlessly). Bald, with needling fangs, they contemplate the possibility of doing their worst. Rego, too, is always bearing down on us, inviting us to contemplate the nasty, complicated flip side of life.