Untitled (Still Life)

In the early 1960s, Francis Newton Souza’s painting style evolved to become more dynamic and gestural. In the present lot, Souza articulates this fundamental shift in his oeuvre through the genre of still life painting. While the artist’s still lifes of the 1950s largely featured monolithic religious vessels, the 1960s marked an evolution with secular subjects and a more energetic application of paint. In the present lot, Untitled (Still Life), painted in 1963, Souza playfully juxtaposes these contrasting styles. While the urn-like vase sits seemingly static, its solidity is turned on its head by the eruption of colorful flowers from its wide mouth, rendered in expressive strokes and thick impasto. This dynamic brushwork brings the flowers to life, as if they are bursting to break free of the canvas itself.

The artist’s palette enhances this vitality with its bright reds, oranges and yellows offset against the pitch-black background. Anticipating Souza’s ‘black paintings’ of the following years, which explored the potency of color when used without any others, this still life has the feel of a photographic negative, with its vase and flowers emerging from the non-naturalistic background as if developing in a dark room. The artist’s effective use of black to delineate forms and figures in his earlier work is inverted here, filling in the spaces between the vivid colors instead.