“...to give pleasure has never been Souza’s aim, and he holds little respect for other artists who set out to do so. He feels that a painter is rather like a furniture manufacturer who possesses an inner compulsion to build the most uncomfortable chairs he can, and then make people sit in them. Why, one may ask, this determination to offend? Why never to please? The answer is, I think, that to Souza art is a form of propaganda, a means of hypnotising others into accepting his view of what the world is like. And because what he has to say is uncomfortable, he feels that his paintings must initially cause discomfort or they have failed: they are sweetmeats. His mistrust of sweetness is so extreme that it has led him to suspect most accepted criteria of what good painting is, and to court individuality at any cost. ‘I now know what art is’, he has written with disarming conceit: ‘art is what I do’.”

– Edwin Mullins, The Human and the Divine Predicament - New Paintings by F.N. SOUZA
Grosvenor Gallery, London, 1964, p4.

“...to give pleasure has never been Souza’s aim, and he holds little respect for other artists who set out to do so. He feels that a painter is rather like a furniture manufacturer who possesses an inner compulsion to build the most uncomfortable chairs he can, and then make people sit in them. Why, one may ask, this determination to offend? Why never to please? The answer is, I think, that to Souza art is a form of propa