ABSTRACT
Centaur begins with a prior set narrative or literary text, but her relationship to that text, as she herself acknowledges, is a disrespectful one, which seeks to destabilise games and hierarchies. Marina Warner eerily talks of Paula's universe as 'a home that's become odd, prickly with desire, and echoing with someone's laughter'. The preoccupations that had haunted the paintings of previous decades might be said to lead directly to the point namely a set of paintings triggered by Portugal's most resolutely anti-clerical novel. Paula's art teacher from her school days in Estoril was an Englishman called Patrick Sarsfield to whom, when she left, she gave a picture of a man lying drowned on a beach, the first and forerunner, as he was later to suggest, of the many male victims in her paintings. Paula Rego's rendering of Amaro's standard Oedipal relationship to a variety of mothers and lovers, holy and secular, lends itself also to a post-Freudian reading.
