https://www.gqindia.com/entertainment/content/the-souza-evolution
In the middle of May, earlier this year, an important moment in Indian art history played out in the unlikely location of Safed, perched high in the mountains of Galilee in Israel. The young Goan-British-Israeli artist Solomon Souza recalls it as “an end-of-the-world, last supply-run type of thing” because lockdown had been temporarily lifted, while the Covid-19 pandemic continued to rage throughout the region. He was taking the opportunity to say goodbye to his mother before moving to Jerusalem and “a perfect studio set-up”. Even while he was getting into his car to leave, Keren Souza-Kohn came to him “with a large roll of canvas in her arms. I could see it was old, dog-eared and browning.” That dusty bundle turned out to be an extremely consequential gift from the past, directly from the hands of the great, pioneering modernist painter (and founder of the seminal Progressive Artists Group of the 1940s) Francis Newton Souza. Solomon says, “It had belonged to my grandfather, and must have been the last roll he ever bought. My mother had procured it after helping to clean out his apartment in New York soon after his death in India in 2002, and she’d been holding onto it for almost 20 years. Now it was being passed on to the next generation, and I felt its powerful potential the moment it touched my hands. I knew his canvas could only be used to pay homage to my grandfather.” The results of this extraordinary passing of the baton are in your hands. GQ readers are immensely privileged to bear witness to this startling, eye-popping, irresistibly compelling and utterly gorgeous international public debut. Solomon says, “I’ve taken up my grandfather’s brutal style, his shocking colours and heavy-hitting lines. Moving as he did, I attempt to allow the canvas the privilege of feeling as it would if Souza himself was painting upon it.” As anyone familiar with both artists’ oeuvres will be able to attest, these new paintings on weathered canvas are all Solomon, yet also bear the signature imprints of his grandfather’s artistic DNA. The three heads are uncannily reminiscent of Souza’s talismanic 1955 Six Gentlemen Of Our Times, although serene, where the originals were spiky with fury. But it is the painting of the young couple that truly takes the breath away, with its lightning strike of museum-calibre genius, along with clear echoes of the superb 1940s oils on board that first made Francis Newton’s reputation. Solomon says these subjects “are leaving behind them the distant smog, the strain of city life, with the future in their hands, and the tools with which to tend to our damaged, cracked and dry earth, and the seeds of potential it contains.” In fact, much the same can be said about this early work: his first truly mature and self-contained painting, his only major artwork to directly confront and embrace his Indian heritage. Souza is dead. Long live the new Souza. It’s been a wild ride over the past year for Solomon. In January, even as the Covid-19 contagion spread stealthily across Europe, but just before its presence turned the world upside-down, he found himself strapped into an extensive safety harness that was dangling from the business end of a crane at Stamford Bridge, the hallowed 143-year-old stadium home of Chelsea Football Club in London. This was the biggest career moment in the young (he turned 27 in July) artist’s life, capping an extraordinary series of highlights, which had culminated in his debut in India last December – the ancestral land of his grandfather. For several magical weeks, he’d roamed Goa on a scooter laden with cans of spray paint, creating murals of unsung Goan heroes, from the Goan-Angolan anti-colonial freedom fighter Sita Valles to the nonagenarian artist Vamona Navelcar, for the Serendipity Arts Festival that immediately attracted considerable attention and acclaim. But now was the really big time: a personal commission from Roman Abramovich (the Russian-Israeli billionaire owner of Chelsea) to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – the notorious Nazi concentration camp, where an estimated 1.1 million people died. Solomon knew all about the subject of his paintings: three footballers who had been condemned to Auschwitz (two of them perished, the third was a British prisoner of war who survived to return home). And there was another more personal inspiration too: It was the memory of his grandmother Liselotte Kristian (née Kohn), who fled Prague immediately after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and had been studying acting at the storied Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London when she met the hungry-eyed FN Souza. Most of that Jewish branch of Solomon’s family tree perished in the Holocaust. The Chelsea commission allowed him to pay tribute to them, in ways which offered up both memorialisation and closure. But there was an additional intriguing plot twist at play, which closed yet another circle for Solomon, underlined by an unmistakable element of redemption. Here he was being paid to express his artistic vision, with full official sanction – including live webcam coverage – on the best-known walls in Chelsea. But just a few miles up the undulating River Thames in the gritty precincts of Hackney, he’d spent a considerable part of his teenage years scrambling away from the Metropolitan Police force, and other authorities who decidedly did not approve of his spray-paint endeavours. It has always been thus for street artists, whether bygone or contemporary. It’s only relatively recently, starting in the late 1980s in New York City, that renowned graffiti masters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons and Keith Haring began to be recognised by galleries and collectors, and realisation began to dawn that masterpieces of our times lurked amidst what was generally reckoned to be vandalism. Leap forward through the decades, and now cities like Buenos Aires and Lisbon vie to commission street art on a multi-million-dollar scale, and the notorious Banksy is quite possibly the most famous artist in the world. Solomon has been part of that journey to commissions and curation, but he still likes to go out at night to paint on buildings where he’s not necessarily welcome. “Art is, at its core, self-expression,” he says, “a tool with which man may make sense of some of the things he feels inside or sees outside. And yet art has been commandeered, it is used and abused. Street art and graffiti exist outside the corruption of money, they aren’t tied to it, don’t need to wait to be paid for, commissioned or hired. It’s a burst of desire, a need to create and communicate.” It’s the elemental jolt that attracts him. “I will forever love the freedom of street painting, the separation of business and creativity, painting just to paint, to influence, shock and awe. It’s an adventure. Something you can never experience while cooped up in a studio.” The young artist has an unusual, bohemian and transcultural background. His mother Keren Souza-Kohn raised him single-handedly “in a huge Victorian house, a rather grand construction. My mother had come into possession of this property after squatting in its abandoned shell with a group of friends... I remember the day the government officials came, more than 20 years after she’d first moved in. They gave her an ultimatum, buy the property or leave. It just so happened that her single mum savings, and the £10,000 that her mother had left her, was just the right amount to secure ownership.” “As I grew, my sense of adventure (and balls) grew,” reminisces Solomon. “I found myself frequently in trouble, spending many nights in cells, with the burn of the handcuffs sizzling upon my wrists. As much as my mother invested everything she had in raising me right, there comes a time when a boy has to take steps towards manhood. And seeing as I had no idea what that felt like, I turned to my peers: a rebellious bunch, constantly in trouble, smoking, stealing, fighting.” The future was shaping up most un-promisingly for the rambunctious teenager when momentous transformation struck his life. Keren Souza-Kohn became immersed in the Jewish heritage of her own mother via the revivalist Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, and decided to relocate her family to Israel. At the age of 17, the repeat offender and confirmed vandal was plucked out from Hackney and plopped down into the ancient city of Jerusalem, eventually attending the Rabbi Avtzons Program, which he describes as “a last-chance-place for boys who had been expelled from other programmes. But that’s when things started to change for me. I grew a lot there. It’s where my motivation and sense of responsibility began to grow.” And thus, from that rather unlikely location, the Souza legacy wound its way back into the annals of art history. A significant beginning was made in 2015, when Solomon began sneaking in to paint at the sprawling, iconic Mahane Yehuda market (aka “The Shuk”) in the heart of Jerusalem. Highly unexpectedly, this pastime went legitimate, then became internationally renowned. He recalls: “A dear friend, Berel Hahn, had the idea to change the face of this historical place, painting portraits of hundreds of heroes – from Golda Meir to Mahatma Gandhi – across the metal shop shutters. I’d painted a few times in the market, illegally and anonymously, sneaking around. But it had never dawned on me to focus my efforts into one push. We found ourselves entwining with the holy city and its occupants. It took me out of the dark and thrust me into the all-seeing eye of the world.” It was this set of artworks that eventually led to Chelsea. Solomon remembers: “Berel and I were honoured to give the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, and his aides, a tour of the market and gallery we’d created. He invited us to an event we couldn’t attend, so we sent our good friend Fleur Hassan-Nahoum [she is now the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem] instead, and she sat next to the Head of Special Projects at Chelsea FC, Rola Brentlin. That’s how I got to Stamford Bridge!” Separately, media attention for Solomon’s work in the Shuk also brought him to my attention, via the internet, from my home in Goa. His grandfather had been a good friend of mine, and remains a lasting inspiration. In 2019, I got permission from Smriti Rajgarhia of the Serendipity Arts Festival to curate ICON: Solomon Souza, as part of my section of the festival entitled Mundo Goa. When Solomon walked onto Goan soil for the very first time, he told me, “Something within me was awakened. Roots of my ancestry that had been deeply buried in the earth began to poke out at me from all angles. I felt love and appreciation, an ancient and kindred connection. Colours and shapes that I grew up surrounded by in the form of my grandfather’s paintings suddenly made sense to me as I experienced their origin. The slap of life, colour and action that hits you when you first step out of the airport is overwhelming, but my mind soon adapted to it, and I felt for a time like Goa was all I knew.” The months-long episode in Goa confronted Solomon directly with his grandfather’s impact and importance. They had met briefly a couple of times, which left only hazy memories, so he’d grown up with the Souza story in the vein of mythology, with powerful paintings on the walls, and oft-repeated stories passed on by his mother and her sisters. Solomon recalls: “My grandfather’s paintings have had a huge conscious, and unconscious, effect on me. I was always enthralled by the brutality, the rawness, the strokes and the textures. He showed me that a painting does not need to be pretty and conforming, but can be a blunt expression of experience, opinion and observation. A lot of my work tells a tale, I know this passion has come directly from my grandfather, through my mother Keren.” Solomon himself recognises this. “My earliest memories are of my little self, making his way up the stairs to my mother’s studio. I grew up on the edge of this enchanted land, peeking at the stacked paint pots and vibrant palettes, with the pungent smells of oil and linseed, and the racks of paintings, each one a wonder, a gem. I didn’t know any different, I thought it was natural and all families had painting rooms in their homes. My mother raised me covered in paint, quite literally! I loved the Power Rangers, and she would frequently paint my entire body red, blue, green... I would prance around the house locked in some imaginary battle. My youth was filled with creativity, which my mother nurtured and encouraged… Without her guidance I wouldn’t be here today.” Still, as Solomon has matured as an artist, and especially after his transformative experience in India (where he would like to return as soon as possible), the paintings and life lessons of Francis Newton Souza are becoming increasingly ingrained in his grandson’s consciousness. When the former was born in his beloved ancestral village of Saligao in North Goa, his homeland was still the centrepiece of the Estado da India of Portugal. Souza wrote in his brilliant *Nirvana Of A Maggot* that it was “a small plot of land left on this planet that had not been poisoned by that ghastly civilisation, if it can still be called a civilisation, with its mechanised fangs which were simply and surely sucking the life out of us.” But he also chafed against the conservative Catholic society he was born into, and was much happier when his mother relocated him 500 kilometres north to Bombay, and the British Raj. Soon after independence in 1947, he migrated to London, and wound up spending the last decades of his life in New York. Those peripatetic, transnational urges have so far characterised Solomon’s life as well. Right until quarantine grounded him in Jerusalem, he was contentedly and constantly on the move. He told me, “I guess I’m a worldly individual, and have been privileged to come from, travel to, and experience many different backgrounds, with a wide range of religious and cultural practices. I am a big mix of a human, a mutt you could say, with roots from India to Israel, which means I sit quite literally on the fence of civilisations, and from my viewpoint I’m able to see the beauty of the world and its differences… As for my personal identity, I’m still discovering it. It’s something I am building, slowly and cautiously, as I make my way through life.” As the world remains mostly locked down due to the global coronavirus pandemic, Solomon has been dwelling on what he desires in the immediate future, with the long view steadily gestating as well. He told me, “I want to keep on doing what I’m doing... It appears to be working. But long term, I want happiness and stability, and a family. It’s what my soul craves.” Watch this space, the Souza story has more chapters on the way.