“Souza is an image maker…. his art lies in his power to strengthen the eye’s image of this world by distorting it…For although a figurative painter, nothing about his art is descriptive: there is no celebration of nature, no attempt to capture the effect of a sunset no concern whatsoever with what is “particular” in life. Above all there is nothing romantic about his paintings.” (Review by Edwin Mullins excerpted from the...
“Souza is an image maker…. his art lies in his power to strengthen the eye’s image of this world by distorting it…For although a figurative painter, nothing about his art is descriptive: there is no celebration of nature, no attempt to capture the effect of a sunset no concern whatsoever with what is “particular” in life. Above all there is nothing romantic about his paintings.” (Review by Edwin Mullins excerpted from the catalogue of F.N.Souza’s first one-man show at Kumar Gallery, Delhi, 1962, in the Asian Age, 29 October 1999)
Souza`s landscapes often embody the same sense of conflict and unease that characterize his human figures. “ Souza’s landscapes…seem to be driven by a cataclysmic force, which wreaks havoc. Most of these are cityscapes following, at first, a simple rectiiear structure.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93). In La Place: Town Square the artist creates an atmosphere that is desolate, yet expectant. This image seems to have been carved out of a flat surface, as “His use of color is convention with thick, ridged strokes of paint squeezed straight from the tube on to the canvas…It is the line that is Souza’s most articulate element and he uses it with great agility to encase the form.” (ibid, p. 93)