Art
March of Souza
By NEVILE WALLIS A GREAT painter may be moved by the savagery of contemporary war to protest with the terrible and haunting imagery of a Goya or Picasso. His violence may make a no less powerful assault upon
our sensibilities when he pro- duces dehumanised figures, at once authentic and mysterious as Francis Bacon's, out of the depths of his being. But let the macabre artist, however strong his equipment, seek to external- ise some bestial future state of mankind and be is all too liable to provoke the tickling sen- sationalism of grand guignot. Dubuffet only avoids this risk because his researchful intelligence is equivocal in expression, and his crazed and desolate zanies belong as much to the rock-face as to futurity. Francis Souza, on the other hand, is the most positively enraged painter alive, and when he predicts the outrages of monsters in a post-nuclear world in several of his new paintings at Gallery One he slithers, more particularly in The Red Curse, ihto fancy-dress melodrama which even his Pictorial resourcefulness cannot redeem. The truth is that our leading Indian contemporary itt the West absolutely lacks any normal self- critical faculty, though his malignancy might carry less conviction, lose its claws, were he to Possess it. His inexorable daemon drives him still. have made my art a metabolism,' he has said. 'I express myself freely in paint in order to exist. I paint what I want, what I like, what I feel.'
Indeed, Souza's most fervently expressive h glues may batter one into submission. Nothing th, his present exhibition conveys for me quite 10 burning a conviction as his earlier Cruci- fixion, barbaric in colour and akin to Gothic tu its jagged stylisation, the thorny shapes re-
The Souza Exhibition continues at Gallery One until December 8: fleeted in the Martyr's fangs. His obsessive imagination, one felt, was still haunted by the image impaled on a Goan crucifix, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns. His strength continues to be in his barbed and incisive black line, sinuous when it is carving out some hard, voluptuous nude, as well as in his incandescent colour.
To be more exact, Souza's style is an amalgam of Indian, of Byzantine and Picassoesque strains, an instrument wielded with his own implacable, often erotic force. To achieve a stylistic syn- thesis expressive of their responses to sur- prising, disturbing Western metropolitan life is the peculiar problem of Eastern artists in Europe. The merging of discovery, reorientated contemplation and cultural background may be altogether too complex for dissection. It is probable that quite independently of Bernard Buffet, but likewise devising a flinty mask connoting spiritual misery, Souza evolved his grim-visaged, thorny elders. His more memor- able achievement, however, lies in his finest pen drawings, in his painted nudes which are em- bodiments of relaxed energy, in townscapes like Klee's toy-towns rocked with dynamite, and also (often overlooked) in Souza's kinship with D. H. Lawrence's flayed integrity in his auto- biographical fragments. 'Every brushstroke makes me recoil like a snake struck with a stick, hate the smell of paint. Painting for me is not beautiful. It is as ugly as a reptile. I attack it. It coils and recoils making fascinating pat- terns. . . .' They become audible, the soft syl- lables of this darkling magician, brooding over his apparitions in Belsize Park.
I Anynot wish to exaggerate his achievement. Any one of the Asians of genuine sensibility and fire, of course, can show up the flim-flam of the style tourisme which drifts .rolartd the com- mercial art-shops. I admit, too, that this is a very unequal exhibition of Souza's, containing only two visionary townscapes (one a water- colour) up to his best endeavour, with nudes rather less masterful than before, and a deal of frenetic devilry where eroticism is brandished without the high sanction of its temple sculp- ture example. Even so, this is the moment to salute the Goan painter, an outcast rejected and redeeming himself, who has travelled so far along the road of honourable fame.
The Gallery One exhibition is, in fact, the moment chosen for the appearance of a review of the artist's career, with many retrospective illustrations.* Flaccid as Mr. Mullins's narrative is, and undistinguished his criticism, his book usefully assembles the known facts of Souza's rickety, squalid childhood in the Portuguese Catholic colony of Goa, his estrangement from the Communist Party and refuge in England, his deliverance from penury again by Stephen Spender and Victor Musgrave, and the means to discharge at every humbug in sight a flight of poisoned arrows.
* SOUZA.' Introdudion by Edwin Mullins. (Blond, 630'
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