Important Notice

“Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you. They do not reach out into the metaphysical unknown, or suggest the primeval forces, or dwell upon the momentous juxtaposition of crimson and cerise. He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and... “Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you. They do not reach out into the metaphysical unknown, or suggest the primeval forces, or dwell upon the momentous juxtaposition of crimson and cerise. He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its intensity.” (Edwin Mullins, F. N. Souza: An Introduction, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p33)

In this lot titled Homer, Souza pays tribute to the great epic writer of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which had an enormous influence on the history of western literature. He revisits the bitter memories of his past, depicting Homer with pock marks like his own, the pustules of smallpox which had ravaged his face, thereby comparing and melding himself with the great Greek bard. When Souza’s autobiographical essay, Nirvana of a Maggot, was published in the journal ‘Encounter’, edited by acclaimed poet Stephen Spender, Souza’s fame extended to the written word. Both, his painting and writing point to the torturous process of creation and the lasting impact on the viewer or reader, a reference to Homer himself, and his legacy.

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