By Jugneeta Sudan

Solomon Souza’s art can be traced to a worthy family lineage. His mother, the British artist Keren Souza-Kohn is a painter in her own right and his grandfather, the Goan-born international artist, F N Souza, was a seminal modernists icon who blazed a trail on the 1950s British art scene alongside contemporaries like Francis Bacon. Carrying the legacy, Solomon Souza brings his own unique signature of a burgeoning street artist to the table. A rising star with a couple of international projects under his belt, Solomon is in Goa (Nov-Dec 2019) working on a monumental project ‘ICON’ for the Serendipity Arts Festival. The aim is to create a body of street art full of recondite information, paying homage to his grandfather first, as well as painting great icons of Goan history whose legacies are fast disappearing from the tiny sliver on the Arabian coast. Solomon recognizes the fascinating opportunity that has come his way, to explore an uncharted territory with which he has a deep ancestral connect.

Vivek Menezes, writer and co-curator Goa Art Lit Festival /Serendipity Arts Festival first heard about Solomon from his artist friend F N Souza back in the year 2000 in US. He was reintroduced to Solomon through the Goan Voice (UK), digital publication curated by the inimitable librarian Eddie Fernandes.  Vivek noted that Solomon had attained recognition for his striking public art work in UK, Australia, US and Israel. Thinking along similar lines, he envisioned a great opportunity for Solomon in Goa, where he would revive forgotten icons, adding a most important chapter in his journey of visually chronicling great world personalities. In collaboration with the unflagging support of the curator of Serendipity Arts Festival, Smriti Rajgarhia-Bhatt, the project is seeing light of day in Goa.  

A crest is always followed by a trough, a cycle in the nature of things. On a high, breathing in the sounds, smells and sights of his ancestral state, Solomon was however extremely anguished to see his Grandfather’s home: the dilapidated abandoned structure in village Saligao, North Goa. Its entrance covered by ripped blue tarpaulin brought tears to his eyes. “Quite heartbreakingly, in a rough state, abandoned and closed off, in dire need of love, attention and repair,” lamented Solomon. It is common knowledge that notwithstanding F N Souza’s avant-garde practice, controversy dogged him right from his school days. He was ostracized by the general public for his radical imagery on religious bigotry and citadels of power and corruption. His preoccupation with the female form was fetishized and questioned.  Thus rejected, he became an outsider and decided to migrate to London in search of a freer space. While the priggish Indian sensibility disregarded him with Pecksniffian relish for his sexually overt portraiture, racism and western supremacy pigeon-holed him abroad. Perhaps for a mix of these reasons, Souza’s legacy in Goa remains shrouded.  His paintings lie wrapped up in attics, and his home lies in need of repair.

Understandably, Solomon’s priority then was to set out on a project of celebrating his grandfather’s village first, by painting murals of its iconic men and women, on public walls. It takes a village to raise a palpable cultural environment, and Saligao ranks high on this account. The village welcomed Solomon with open arms and he was sighted perched on his ladder, spray painting road facing walls of people’s homes, giving colour and form to a select group of worthy celebrities hailing from the village. Solomon wrote on his timeline, “Souza you live on in me and all your descendants. I pray we make you proud.”   

Watching Solomon paint is the real deal. The energy is ‘fiery and fervent’ with layering of multiple colours to arrive at final tones and textures.  Armed with spray cans with nozzles, grey face mask, a ladder and a fag held between his fingers, he set out to map the wall.  Dressed in cargo shorts, t-shirt and sturdy shoes, there was a lot of nibble movement up and down the ladder establishing the basic elements of the portrait. First came the outline using a fine nozzle, which was replaced by bigger-wider nozzles, spray painting larger areas. Darker colours at the base were sprayed with lighter, and then more lighter shades. The rivulets of colours created chaotic patterns, but there was a steadfast focus, streamlining the process into discernible form and shape. Frequent breaks to wipe his brow and sip water continued with vigorous spew of paint on the wall. Finally with precision he outlined contours with a very fine nozzle and stepped down sweaty and replete with satisfaction.

The first icon to be honored was ‘Sacrula’ in a brown cassock and silver cross who advocated praise of God across communities and blessed locals from all walks of life. Equally given the epithets, ‘madman’ and ‘mystic’, he held magical awe for local school children who often sighted him biking vigorously through the village. Solomon’s choice of dark earthy skin tone with flecks of a darker brown, those furrowed lines, and tiny crisscrossing patterns dissecting the mud dark surface add gravitas to the portraiture. The deep yellow background further accentuates the face in deep prayerful repose with folded hands. Treatment of the hair, with each strand crisp and distinct rounded the profile in a semicircular fashion. The play of shadow and light in the painting cast a chiaroscuro effect, affirming Solomon’s technique in spray painting executed dexterously within a matter of hours.

The bohemian self-possessed noted poet, Eunice de Souza, who struck terror in men’s hearts with her razor sharp tongue, is smiling in Solomon’s portraiture. A rare delightful quirk of her lips with a bird mounted on her head, she is surrounded by tall green coconut trees swaying in the gentle breeze. The incorrigible, irrepressible but irresistible woman was portrayed with the twinkle in her eyes, indicative of her gleeful victory; the red splashes on her face doing justice to her fiery temperament. Solomon’s execution befits the uncrowned empress who even in death, perched on a high wall has the last laugh over a crawling humanity.

In a path-breaking turn from his work earlier, Solomon painted a mural of the 89-year-old Vamona Navelcar whilst Vamona sat nonchalantly sketching a handheld white canvas in a chair across the street from his own home in the village of Pomburpa. Vamona, a contemporary of F N Souza, is Don Quixote incarnate, a knight of faith with his ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity both in mind and spirit. Having lived and worked as an artist across Goa, Portugal and Mozambique, the inviolate Vamona exercised free will and transcended it. Keeping up with his indomitable spirit, Solomon etched him unwavering and solid, in vibrant colors with blue-framed spectacles perched on pinkish face tones.

Solomon is a self taught British-Israeli artist who took to graffiti and street art when he was 11. For the last four years, he has been involved in an exciting project the ‘Shuk Gallery’ in the Mahane Yehuda market of Jerusalem, painting world-wide icons on the corrugated metal shutters of shops by night, in collaboration with his project director (and schoolmate) Behel Hahn, with funding from shop-owners and local enterprises. In the process, the places have not only morphed  into a public art gallery (especially on Sabbath Saturdays when the shutters are down) but Solomon’s art has also given expression to a project that elevates human thought with inspiring stories of iconic personalities and the difference they’ve made.

The portraiture in Solomon Souza’s art is a reading of ‘inner psychology’, to perceive the character of a person. Though just in his 20s, Solomon endeavors to mirror the interiority of iconic yet obscure heroes in his street art projects. The juxtaposition of obscurity with public art makes it subversive, but a discerning idealist element cannot be denied.  The idealism was probably derived from Solomon’s rooting in Yeshiva, the Jewish educational institution that focuses on the study of traditional religious texts such as the Talmud and the Torah. The underlining grid of Halachah, the collective body of Jewish religious laws, which he imbibed in his teens, may be finding expression in the Kaballah, the practice of Jewish mysticism, and Solomon may be on his quest to live the wisdom of the inner Torah. Well entrenched in Jewish philosophy and theology, he illuminates the stories of Hebrew/Biblical myth, embodying powerful messages for an evolved humanity. The undisputed spark of enormous energy in his art, its elevating quality and lively warm colors gives reason to believe so.

Solomon is unstoppable now, marking flow of life in the capital with the Souzaesque stamp. The wonderful turn of events marks an important chapter in Souzaesque art legacy, as it moves from the attic to public art. Ardent followers of F N Souza and the world at large wait with baited breath, for the finale, when Solomon will paint a mural of his grandfather. Goa is presently witness to the grandfather-grandson connect that is possibly the biggest highlight of this season and is likely to go down as an important event in Indian art history.  

Jugneeta Sudan is our Arts Review Editor.