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Lot 10

 

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Although his portraits and nudes are probably his most well-known works, F.N. Souza's oeuvre also included several magnificent landscapes and still lifes. Informing the artist's work in all these genres, however, was the uneasy relationship he shared with organised religion, specifically Roman Catholicism, throughout his life.

As a child in Goa, Souza grew up in awe of the Roman Catholic Church. Admitting a somewhat naive fascination... Although his portraits and nudes are probably his most well-known works, F.N. Souza's oeuvre also included several magnificent landscapes and still lifes. Informing the artist's work in all these genres, however, was the uneasy relationship he shared with organised religion, specifically Roman Catholicism, throughout his life.

As a child in Goa, Souza grew up in awe of the Roman Catholic Church. Admitting a somewhat naive fascination with the pageantry of his faith, which might explain the ornamentation and detail in his works like present lot, the artist reminisces, "The Roman Catholic church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. The priest dressed in richly embroidered vestments, each of his garments from the biretta to the chasuble symbolising the accoutrements of Christ's passion" (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 42). As the artist grew older, however, he gradually became aware of what he perceived to be the pretences and hypocrisy of his religion and its proponents. Ever since, his life and work have been marked by the tension he constantly experienced between the adherence to his faith and the urge to harshly criticize it.

Just as he did with the disfigured portraits of saints and men that he painted during the 1950s, the artist applied the genre of still life to his critical interrogation of the notion of divine sanction, and its various interpretations and vehicles. In paintings like the present lot, an impressive still life executed in 1959, Souza presents Catholicism as nothing deeper than vestment, decoration and ceremony - an ornamental faith based on appearances, words and objects rather than people. Instead of mocking its priests and saints, as he does in several of his figurative works from the period, here the artist questions the rituals and symbols of the Church.

In some of his still lifes, Souza painted objects including the Ciborium, Chalice and Patens that were clearly ecclesiastical. Here, however, the artist presents everyday vessels like claret jugs and candle- stands in a religious context, almost as if the bright red table they are lined up on is an altar, and they are awaiting their part in some liturgical practice. With his characteristic thick black line and an unusual intensity of decoration and detail, Souza executed this still life at the zenith of his fame in London, a period in which he repeatedly invoked religious themes to question organized faith and its representatives.

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