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Lot 28

 

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F.N. Souza was raised a Roman Catholic and always referred to the ‘tremendous influence’ of its imagery on his creative psyche. The present lot depicts a moment from the biblical story of Supper at Emmaus, a well established scene painted by several masters including Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Titian. According to the parable, Jesus, returning to earth after his resurrection, is encountered as a stranger by two of his disciples along a road. He... F.N. Souza was raised a Roman Catholic and always referred to the ‘tremendous influence’ of its imagery on his creative psyche. The present lot depicts a moment from the biblical story of Supper at Emmaus, a well established scene painted by several masters including Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Titian. According to the parable, Jesus, returning to earth after his resurrection, is encountered as a stranger by two of his disciples along a road. He joins them for a meal at Emmaus at which his divine identity is revealed. Extending the allegorical tale, this image touches on the idea of eternal companionship, the nature of revelation, and the concept of enduring faith.

Carl Jung once stated that the story of Emmaus was similar to that of Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Souza began reading the Bhagavad Gita in 1969, and it was the same year that his paintings took on an altered ‘look’ that he continued to develop through the 1970s. Spiritually, Souza sought to express pure joy, which he equated with pure energy. In a letter to his ex-wife Liselotte in 1971, he describes this ‘new look’ saying, “The colours are pure, in precious nuggets placed by the brush on propitious parts of the painting or dragged along the canvass with energy so powerful it could bend steel girders!...I have also eliminated ‘line’, the black line and cross-hatchings I used to gird and spine my paintings with in the past…Now I use line only for drawing on paper, not painting”.

The present lot is rendered on a darkened matt ground. Three figures sit round a table set for dinner. Revealed from the darkness and mapped out in glossy spots and blobs, the figurative shapes are extruded like strings of dancing atoms, pure in colour, ever ready to mutate into subjects of the artist’s next painting. With these beads of energy, Souza transports this ancient parable to the 1970s, a decade he experienced in New York as a new and pulsating modern age.

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