Important Notice

“Beauty is Nature’s creation; colours are a wonder; Light, which contains colours, is a miracle...” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza moved to New York in 1967, leaving behind his successful career in London for a new adventure. Alone in a foreign country, he had to begin from nothing. Ever determined and innovative, Souza pushed the boundaries of his practice during this time.

Souza travelled around America in the subsequent decade,... “Beauty is Nature’s creation; colours are a wonder; Light, which contains colours, is a miracle...” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza moved to New York in 1967, leaving behind his successful career in London for a new adventure. Alone in a foreign country, he had to begin from nothing. Ever determined and innovative, Souza pushed the boundaries of his practice during this time.

Souza travelled around America in the subsequent decade, experimenting with a more colourful and brighter palette and a more vibrant, gestural style of brushstroke. This was a period of great technical innovation for him, and he began to experiment with using chemical solvents on magazine paper. Perhaps influenced by the graffiti and street art subcultures in New York, as well as artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, Souza used chemicals to distort the existing pigments on the printed page, creating his famous “chemical paintings.”

The present lot, however, comes from a much later period in his career. Painted in 1990, this landscape is markedly different from other landscapes made by Souza from this period. It has been painted with an almost monochromatic palette with shades of sepia and ochre, which is quite unlike the vivid and often bright palette used for several of his landscapes from the time. The sun makes a rather notable and powerful appearance, with visibly projected light rays, amidst clouds that are neatly outlined - in a manner unlike most of Souza’s landscapes.

The architecture hints at a European setting, with elaborate churches, tall steeples and narrow winding lanes leading uphill. The buildings aren’t entirely distorted nor are they depicted with the frenzy and instability as was the case with many of his landscapes from the 1960s onward. Instead of the apocalyptic urgency that characterised many of Souza’s landscapes, we are faced with an ethereal calm here. Yet the landscape has an uncanny quality to it, with the architectural structures arranged in two clusters that almost mirror each other at either end of the composition.

Framing every element in the composition is Souza’s iconic thick black line, inspired perhaps by the work of Chaim Soutine and Georges Rouault or by the stained glass windows of the churches that the artist was taken to by his grandmother in Goa. “It is the line that is Souza’s most articulate element and he uses it with great agility to encase the form. It is a sharp, clear, virile boundary that separates negative space from positive space and by its sheer virtuosity delineates the subject.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure,” The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)

Although Souza’s presence faded from the Modern British art scene when he shifted to New York, he continued to feature in prominent exhibitions such as The Other Story, organised by Rasheed Araeen at Hayward Gallery, London in 1989. He has also been recognised by private and public institutions, both prior to his demise and posthumously. In 1993, the Tate Modern Britain bought his 1959 painting titled Crucifixion and the institution has recently shown his work and allocated a section of their gallery to him, identifying him as an artist who is an integral part of modern British art history. “Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision...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. His forebears are Grunewald, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, Daumier, Rouault and Picasso – painters whose imaginations conceived new patterns of reality out of images which their eyes have witnessed.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd, 1962, p. 33)

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