The Cigarette

Faithful to her subversive spirit, The Cigarette perfectly illustrates Paula Rego's mastery of painting and drawing, and employs her unique approach to figurative art to once again build a complex visual narrative. Throughout her oeuvre, Rego interlaces literature (texts by Dante Alighieri, Hans Christian Andersen, Charlotte Brontë, Ea de Queirós and Martin McDonagh have been of inspiration for her) and history of art (echoes from Francisco de Goya, William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon impregnate her works) with personal experiences, dreams, fears and fantasies. In The Cigarette, Rego addresses the conventional roles assumed by women in society employing her own background and unique prospective as female artist and depicts a simultaneously emphatic and reflexive figure through her choice of a subject questioning the innermost social stereotypes and the human condition. The robust character which has been presented like a servant, but with the strength and determination of a master, looks directly at the viewer while holding a cigarette in her enormous hand in a very masculine gesture. The sitter shows her proud disdain for an imposed sexual and cultural role and even defies the traditional ideal of feminine beauty. Here, we see the artist's extraordinary skill in the use of pastel, the media she has most thoroughly worked with in the last fifteen years, and with which she achieves forms full of voluptuousness, intensity and freshness, emphasized by a very powerful, vehement and violent use of her choice medium. In the present work Rego once again has chosen her model from her most intimate circle, and long-time model and friend Lila Nunes presents the viewer with an intimate and immediately recognizable image, but one that is somehow controversial and disturbing.