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Through the looking-glass: Paula Rego's visual rhetoric, an 'aesthetics of danger'

This article analyses Paula Rego's 'visual rhetoric' as a transgressive aesthetics that is construed as a political satire addressed at dogmatic truths and homologic universes. Rego's 'aesthetics of danger', as she calls it, is set in an ambivalent atmosphere of 'joyful relativity' (sic Bakhtin) that translates the artist's female 'unruliness' and deep carnivalesque sense of the world. In claiming that 'my favourite subjects are the "games" originated by power, domination and heirarchies. They make me always feel like setting everything upside-down and reversing the established order of things', Rego articulates her position in art as occupying an 'ideologically strategic terrain'. I argue that Rego's appropriation of high art is simultaneously subversive and parodic. Like Alice, Rego enters Wonderland 'through the back door', upsetting law and order, inscribing in the halls of the great tradition her doubly alien perception as woman and foreigner, as 'an other from within'.