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Lot 32

 

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Lots 30-32 were likely created using a technique that F N Souza developed in the late 1960s. At this time, the artist had recently moved to New York, and was seeking both more affordable materials to work with, and greater experimentation. Possibly 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, he began to use a new technique to create artworks.... Lots 30-32 were likely created using a technique that F N Souza developed in the late 1960s. At this time, the artist had recently moved to New York, and was seeking both more affordable materials to work with, and greater experimentation. Possibly 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, he began to use a new technique to create artworks. Referred to as "alterations," these works involved using chemical solutions to distort the print on magazine paper, whose pigments provided the colour to the work.

These works were a combination of the printed and painted image, and according to art critic K B Goel, "Their closeness to print culture demands that they are read as a self-apparent play of graffiti space. They also speak of how... we ourselves enjoy looking through them to admire the compositional sense of how the game is played. It is the same old game Souza is adept at, one which allows him to break (down) our inhibitions and undo our muscle-bound understanding." (The Times of India, 1990, online)

In these works, the chemicals reacted with the existing surface, creating diverse and unpredictable layers, textures and forms. Still defined by Souza's characteristic bold line, this "creative destruction" allowed the artist to extract meanings and create subversive content. Though a new technique for the artist, these works were in keeping with the essence of his art. "Perhaps the artist's oeuvre is best understood in the context of Souza as destroyer. His life and work has been informed by the systematic destruction of the staid and banal - destruction of the ordinary, vapid conceptions of beauty, colour and form, and the subsequent reconstruction of these tenets in his own heretic, angst-driven, yet paradoxically fluid and easy rendition." ("F N Souza, Important Paintings from the Artist's Private Collections," bosepacia.com, 1998, online)

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