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…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... “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…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…Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd, London, 1962, p. 33, 40).

In the present lot, F.N. Souza’s unmerciful black lines scar his subject’s face, but do not seem to cause him any pain or suffering. Although he wears a crown and a richly decorated tunic, the subject’s blank gaze and carelessly displaced facial features including several high-set eyes and an elongated tubular nose contradict any dignity they might offer. One of the artist’s contemptuous portraits of emperors, the impassive ruler he paints in this frame underscores the soullessness of the wealthy and powerful rather than their largesse and nobility.

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