Important Notice

“Souza’s imagery is not a surrealist vision - a self-conscious aesthetic shock - so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations.”
- (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 39)

The present lot, which was painted in 1966, is a powerful if unsettling work by F N Souza from among his series of Heads. It is through these... “Souza’s imagery is not a surrealist vision - a self-conscious aesthetic shock - so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations.”
- (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 39)

The present lot, which was painted in 1966, is a powerful if unsettling work by F N Souza from among his series of Heads. It is through these figures, for which he is best known, that he laid bare his views on society, the hypocrisy of religion, and human nature and its depravities. Though he had reached the peak of his career by the mid-1960s, following several successful exhibitions in London and abroad, this period was a tumultuous one for his personal life. His worldview darkened as a result, as did the nature of his paintings during this time. Remarking on the mindset underlying Souza’s art, Edwin Mullins wrote in his 1962 monograph on the artist that his “inner spark is a violent one, destructive, cantankerous, sadistic. Aggression and pain are closely linked as though every picture opened up a private wound and acted as a purge at the same time.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 40)

Though he never fully embraced abstraction in his Heads, Souza divested the human form of all its humanity through a grotesque manipulation of its features to reveal what he considered to be the true nature of man. He once wrote, “I wanted to do everything; to make others suffer, to make myself suffer. I have no desire to redeem myself or anybody else because Man by his very nature is unredeemable, yet he hankers so desperately after redemption.” (F N Souza, “My Friend and I,” Words and Lines, London: Villiers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 26) He experimented with style and technique, initially achieving this disfiguration through thick parallel lines and dense cross-hatching during the 1950s. In the decade that followed, he transitioned from the careful delineation of these images to a more fluid style.

As the present lot demonstrates, Souza “used a technique of scribbling, covering the initial image with a multitude of discs and loops and rings which serve to suggest eyes, teeth, hair, nails, ornaments, or, with minimum variation, embroidered motifs on the garments.” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1979, p. 28). Violence and chaos underlie the figure and yet it is also a masterwork of control and structure, the image scaffolded by the thick black line so quintessential to Souza. The quivering arrows that frequently pierce his Heads have been replaced with nails that hang from the figure’s neck, possibly an allusion to the crucifixion of Christ-another frequent theme in Souza’s oeuvre-or an indication of tremendous mental anguish and suffering. Horns emerge from either side of the head leaving little doubt about its diabolical nature. The work is rendered on a rich and piercing blue cloth support. During this time, Souza made a number of works using unusual materials such as treated satins and calicos as his canvas, in his irresistible quest for discovery and experimentation of new material languages.

Observes critic Yashodhara Dalmia, “The stench of the human race cannot be studied dispassionately in these works. One is forced to enter the flame and be choked by the raw passions and experience the canker which eats the flesh and enters the very marrow of the bone.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure”, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 82)

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