Still Life with Relics

“Even here, there is an obsession with the symbols of the conflict, with the vessels of Mass and Benediction, with reliquaries and crosses; emblems of the holy that suppresses the power of the Evil One. Under the guise of seeking after pure form the conflict reaches excruciating levels; the demonic savage even seizes the sacrament” ('Two Goan Artists: SOUZA, PEREIRA', Marg, vol. 8, no. 1, Bombay, December 1954, p. 30).

Francis Newton Souza was born in 1924 in the Portuguese colony of Goa and brought up by his mother and grandmother as a practicing Catholic. The spectacle and ceremony in the ornamented churches he visited as a child left a lasting impression on the artist. He recalls, “The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services [...] The wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches. The smell of incense. And the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns. I would kneel and pray for hours. When the sacristan came around with the collection plate, I would drop on it, with great satisfaction, the large copper coin given me by my grandmother. I felt I had paid an instalment for the salvation of my soul” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 42).

Despite his mother’s encouragement to join the cloth as a Jesuit priest following Souza’s seemingly miraculous recovery from smallpox as a young boy, he was not a particularly spiritual or religious person. It is important to make the distinction that it was the physical manifestation of religion rather than spirituality or faith that took root in Souza’s psyche and was made manifest in his art. The physical signifiers of the Catholicism he experienced in childhood became a lifelong obsession and perhaps the most significant and constant influence in his art. Souza used these visual cues to set up tensions or conflict in his paintings, often between religion, violence and sexuality.

After moving to London in 1949, Souza initially found it hard to gain a foothold in the competitive artworld there. Perhaps this is why his works from the early 1950s are his most nostalgic. However, rather than images of the Goan landscape of his childhood, it was his memories of the liturgy that manifested in these paintings. Drawing from memory, Souza created a series of still life paintings that focus on the altars in the churches of his youth. The present lot, an exquisite painting titled Still Life with Relics from 1954, is an iconic representation of Souza’s unique take on the genre, which appears at first to present a benign series of objects atop a checkered tablecloth. Closer inspection reveals a chalice on the left and what appears to be a monstrance and a reliquary to the center and right. The chalice or cup overtly references the Eucharist, when Jesus Christ transubstantiated the wine from his cup into his own blood and the bread into the flesh of his body. This Biblical miracle informs the holy sacrament of Communion, taken at Roman Catholic Mass, when worshipers who partake in the ritual are brought under unity with Christ and protected from sin. The relics Souza refers to in his title, believed to be physical remains relating to saints, martyrs and even Christ, represent an additional source of power in this painting, subject to veneration from both the artist and his viewers.

The ornate brocaded background and checkered altar cloth provide a solemn stage on which the protagonist relics and vessels perform. Underscoring the importance given to ornamental altar linens in a service, this patterned setting also recalls the luminous stained glass windows of Catholic churches and the tunics and vestments of the priests and saints Souza often depicted in his portraits from this seminal period. However, as the critic Geeta Kapur noted, Souza’s interpretations of the still-life, like the present lot, are not irreverent or contemptuous, representing a rare celebration of the sacred in his body of work. “They are mostly ornate vessels and sacred objects. These objects retain their ritual aspect both on account of the visual description and composition. They appear brightly burnished and sometimes carry a halo such as a devotee must imagine each holy object to possess as he sees it being carried forth in High Mass. They are, moreover, clustered formally as if on the shelf of the sacristy [...] The point is, his objects belong neither to the intimate comforts of a home nor to the glamour of the market-place, both environments being specifically bourgeois in their origins. Very curiously in the object-world he reclaims the sense of the sacred that he so consciously drains from the human being and from God” (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, pp. 29-30).

Still Life With Relics is one of the earliest and most important examples of Souza’s sacramental still life paintings, inextricably tied to his personal relationship with the holy rites and mysteries of the Catholic church. Treated with a reverential solemnity, the present lot reflects the artist’s nostalgic recollections of religion from his childhood, and sets up a fascinating contradiction at the heart of his practice. Despite demonizing the clergy for what they represented, Souza felt himself drawn back time and again to the powerful symbols at the heart of Catholicism.