F N Souza is undoubtedly the greatest artist to emerge out of Goa and he still has the capacity to evoke very strong emotions. Janieta Singh, the author of the book, ‘F N Souza - The Archetypical Artist’ was very clear as to why she wrote the book on the man. She was going through a personal crisis and as she was looking at his work, she began to get more insights as she went on this self healing journey. She was also involved in Pallium psychology for over a decade. She began to see shadows in his work and then quickly came to believe that Souza’s work is an exercise in shadow work of the collective human consciousness.
Everything that was suppressed and rejected is glorified, even if that gets a grotesque configuration. Since Souza was dealing with the interiority of the human psyche and pulling it out and showcasing it, that’s why his art was so distorted and grotesque. When people look at his art, they see their psyche in that distorted mirror and that troubles them. It triggers them and it is an uneasy space.
Janeita said, “There was a social revolution in his work. He is envisioning liberated men and liberated women, a strong man and a strong woman. He has that courage and his art comes from his unconscious. He is not consciously saying that he will make the women all those primordial images and he is giving them shape and form. He is envisioning a society where there is an equal playing field where man and the woman enter into a relationship which will be mutually beneficial and not one of transactions. It is based on friendship and that she was strong in her own right and they would come together.”
FN Souza was an artist who was calling out the shadows, the hypocrisy and the bigotry of our day to day life as well as the institutions of state and religion. He was looking through all of that and his religious paintings are a powerful satire. Putting all this together was an experience, ideas for essays would pop up in her brain which she would write and would be published.
She was also travelling to small art towns in Europe and she would visit Picasso museum, Chagal museum and in her subconscious, the comparative study was still going on. When she wrote the essays she felt free but she still had these raging questions since she was going through a crisis and Souza was giving her answers through the canvasses. She was not looking to decipher anything or looking hard for anything in his personal life. The canvases were her main focus. All the images created a great deal of controversy especially during the British times with their Victorian mentality and how they maligned the Kama Sutra and labeled the devadasis as prostitutes which meant Indians had become ashamed of their own civilisation.
“India has six schools of philosophy which gives you a whole room to play with. You can be with a god or not or you begin your own journey and don’t go to any god. Souza was agnostic and he said he did not believe in any god though he believed in Sankhya philosophy and tantra though born a Catholic. He took bits of all the religions and came up with his own cosmology and that gave him a lot of courage or clarity of what he saw around him. And he commented on that through his paintings and led people through different possibilities,” explains Janeita.
It is important to remember that FN Souza was a post world war artist and thinkers and philosophers were thinking of the things that people do and why it was done. His head series, she said, documented the interiority of his psyche. The shadows highlighted the aggressiveness, ambition or whatever the individual had. He was pulling everything out of consciousness, throwing it away and filling it with amorphous forms.
Souza, towards the end of his life, almost had a maternal instinct for the coming generation. He was a patriarch with a very strong masculine psychology but he also had a very strong feminine core. This made him a very balanced human being and all those intuitions came from his feminine side. All this made him a very interesting individual and this book is a celebration of that complex man.