Francis Newton Souza

Atlanta, Georgia, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest, March - May, 2011

R. Brown, Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, 2010, illustration p. 85

There is craquelure present across the surface on the work, primarily in areas of impasto. There are fine creases present across the paper and pinhole sized spots of darker pigment possibly inherent.
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Art Historian Rebecca Brown notes, “Grotesque, forceful, jabbing gestures emerging from the canvas, tools scrape away the paint surface, texture merges with colour to form a dynamic image of self. The work cites the multifaceted faces and masks of the Cubist idiom while undermining those references with colour, dramatic line, and repetition of form. In these works, Souza engages with a contemporary British deconstruction of the portrait found in the work of Francis Bacon (1909-1992). He also draws on his own experience in Catholic Goa, a part of Portuguese India, where priests, bishops, and popes comprised major icons of authority. The frontality of the figures demands our attention, while the dissolution into energetic gestures, and the escape from the confines of the skull and the body, ask us to question the stability of the self. In these works, Souza explores what it means to be Indian in a postcolonial, globalizing world.” (R. Brown, Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, 2010, p. 76)