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Lot Essay
Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels. I paint for angels to show them what men and women really look like.
In 1963, amid the screaming faces of men and women that had become Souza's trademark, capturing the angst (and often bestial nature) of the human condition, the artist created a handful of works that depict the inherent violence of man against beast. In this untitled work of a horse being broken in, Souza sets up a psychological tension for the viewer, through the taut movement and facial expression of the central figure of the horse, which evokes a visceral experience of the animal's terror and violation of spirit. The absence of human figures, with the horse placed centrally on the canvas, offers a rare opportunity to take a visual journey into the psyche of an animal in captivity. The madness in the horse's eyes, the fear expelling through its open mouth, brings to mind Edvard Munch's series of paintings, The Scream. Like Munch's expressionist works in this series, thought by some to symbolize the existential angst of the human species, Souza's horse captures and isolates the existential angst of the animal kingdom when faced with the terror of death. Master painters through millennia have captured the fear and fury of horses in battle; but rarely have artists sought to demonstrate to Raphael and Michelangelo's renaissance angels, as Souza does here, the inherent violence of man against beast perhaps invoking in the viewer the distant memory of the Old Testament God who gave man dominion over the animal kingdom: thus unleashing upon all animals the insatiable violence inherent in human nature which left unchecked is more cruel than the most violent of acts by animals upon each other in their habitats. (Shelley Souza, 2007)
In 1963, amid the screaming faces of men and women that had become Souza's trademark, capturing the angst (and often bestial nature) of the human condition, the artist created a handful of works that depict the inherent violence of man against beast. In this untitled work of a horse being broken in, Souza sets up a psychological tension for the viewer, through the taut movement and facial expression of the central figure of the horse, which evokes a visceral experience of the animal's terror and violation of spirit. The absence of human figures, with the horse placed centrally on the canvas, offers a rare opportunity to take a visual journey into the psyche of an animal in captivity. The madness in the horse's eyes, the fear expelling through its open mouth, brings to mind Edvard Munch's series of paintings, The Scream. Like Munch's expressionist works in this series, thought by some to symbolize the existential angst of the human species, Souza's horse captures and isolates the existential angst of the animal kingdom when faced with the terror of death. Master painters through millennia have captured the fear and fury of horses in battle; but rarely have artists sought to demonstrate to Raphael and Michelangelo's renaissance angels, as Souza does here, the inherent violence of man against beast perhaps invoking in the viewer the distant memory of the Old Testament God who gave man dominion over the animal kingdom: thus unleashing upon all animals the insatiable violence inherent in human nature which left unchecked is more cruel than the most violent of acts by animals upon each other in their habitats. (Shelley Souza, 2007)