Querozito De Souza’s recent paintings, developed in pen-and-ink with watercolour on canvas board, are shaped by an engraver’s passionate fineness. It is the striking, eddying, whirring line that substains these paintingsand is their key strength; indeed, it sometimes has the effect of making their colour, vivid and insistent as it is, seem purely heraldic or even superfluous. This is not mere happenstance: we must remember that the Goa-born artist served his apprenticeship at Shantiniketan, and is an inheritor of its lively graphics tradition. He displays the print-maker’s special understanding of how to translate line into mass, of how to render a maze of markings into the concrete occupancy of space.
Querozito’s work represents, when viewed along with that of a select number of his contemporaries, a particular spectrum of artistic choices made in Goa (I will not use the constriciting identitarian label of ‘Goan art’). These choices involve an engagement of the artistic subjectivity with the magical and the surreal, the folkloric and the bizarre; and with the invisible as it communicates itself in strange forms, through unexpected physical transformations, the irruption of a dream and nightmare through the textures of everyday life. We have yet to account for the emergence of such idioms, in the context of a vibrantly Indo-Iberian culture, several intertwined dynamics of modernity, the compelling persistence of magical thinking, and the fact that most individuals in Goa are compounded from multiple religious and cultural identities.
Querozito’s own work stands at the quiter, more reflective end of this spectrum of choices. His primary visual emphasis is the figure. To be precise, he works with figures that offer themselves, not as prescences, but as markers of the prescence: as hints of the passage of a corporal form, the impress of a body. In these paintings, the skin unpeels itself like the rind of a fruit, floating like sensuous wrap awaiting another body to mantle itself around. Or when we savour the curve of a limbthat has left its trace in the air, a crease of skin, a knob of bone. This allusive method works most elegantly when it is fragmentary and episodic, notational in its references. The artist betrays the source of his magic when he approximates a recognizable form too explicitly, as when he permits himself the occasional indulgence of referring to the gait and attitude of the fashion model.
The body is a mask, in Querozito’s interpretation, since it is always either unpeeling itself or wrapping itself around an implied form. And what lies behind this evident yet elusive form? What is the nature of the self that it shrouds in visibility: what are the secret harmonies or discontents of that self? The artist ventures beyond the dyadic dance of the male and female tendencies in some of these paintings, as when the robust figure of the bull breaks through the choreography of human forms. The bull is a personification of primal earth energies, its urgencies dating back to before the advent of courtesy and conversation; it manifests itself like a secret desire erupting into the light, an archaic impulsive raising its horned, untameable head in the assembly of civilized opinions. Querozito De Souza’s present work suggests a force held in reserve; perhaps these paintings are a token of the fiercer expressions that are yet to come, expressions that will make intense but rewarding demands on the viewer.