Important Notice

Souza's paintings and drawings of the mid and late 1950s comprise some of his best works. Of these works, the artist's portraits of the "tortured saints" he recalls from his early years in Goa are legendary. Disfiguring icons like St. Peter, St. Sebastian and John the Baptist, these gruesome images not only offer us insight into the artist's life, but are also a significant source of his social and religious commentary. "If he was creating... Souza's paintings and drawings of the mid and late 1950s comprise some of his best works. Of these works, the artist's portraits of the "tortured saints" he recalls from his early years in Goa are legendary. Disfiguring icons like St. Peter, St. Sebastian and John the Baptist, these gruesome images not only offer us insight into the artist's life, but are also a significant source of his social and religious commentary. "If he was creating monsters, probably no one would be troubled; but because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead…why he paints mouths that stretch like hair combs across the face, and limbs that branch out like thistles. 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, Anthony Blond Ltd, London, 1962, p. 39).

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