ALYSON
SOUZA
by
Andy Brumer
(Robert
Berman Gallery,
Santa Monica) This is Alyson Souza's first one person show, and it represents
quite an impressive debut for this young artist. Souza moved to Los Angeles from
New York three years ago, to, "be able to work and live in the sun year
round." Much of her work and psychic energy blazes and brews, transforms
and transfigures itself in the mythic cauldron of the collective and personal
unconscious, where darkness and light intertwine in an eternal dance. It is no
wonder then that this artist, daughter of New York-based artist Al Souza, found
herself drawn to the Southern California light.
In
this exhibition, Souza employs her thickly applied paint to create realistically
rendered, though surrealistically spirited images positioned inside custom-made
boxes. Archetypal subjects and signs, such as The Clown, The Castle, The Cross,
The Old Lady, The Snake, and The Curtain sit in Joseph Cornell-like boxes,
several of them arranged into triptych configurations and/or shaped in the form
of altars. As Souza poetically writes in her statement for this show, "the
3-dimensional paintings of carnivalesque mechanizations, bright colors and
intense incongruity induce an encounter wherein the mundane seems oddly
sinister, and vice-versa. This interactive rhythm plays throughout the work,
gathering momentum with each piece like an accumulation of familiar, yet
ethereal memories. . ."
In
Circus Altarpiece a somewhat sinister
and world-weary clown smiles disturbingly from the middle panel, centered
between two sides of a lusciously heavy blue velvet curtain. To the clown's
left, a circus elephant (identified as such by the festive 'blanket' that drapes
the animal's head) paces somnambulistically forward. At his left, a terrifying
lion growls wide-mouthed, exposing sharp and eerily enticing teeth. A coiled
snake fills the triangular panel above the clown’s head as a symbol of stored
energy and occluded meaning. The masculine lion, the feminine elephant, the
androgynous snake, seem parts of the clown's inner 'family;' in Jungian terms,
his anima, animus, and Self.
Another
triptych composes three panels side-by-side, each with a distinct name: Tiny
Evils-Disrespect; Tiny Evils-Deception;
and Tiny Evils-Destruction. The artist
divides each panel into three vertical sub-panels, heightening the haunting play
between psychic vastness and containment. In the first panel (reading the piece
from left to right), a disembodied arm passes across the frame into the middle
panel, where it touches a self-portrait of the artist's own face and head. This
figure in turn reaches with its left hand into the third panel to pull a red
curtain down over a painted image of a castle surrounded by a forest.
The
second large panel, Tiny Evils-Deceptions (again, sectioned into three vertical
sub-panels), presents the same arm and hand as in the left-hand large panel as
it reaches over into the middle zone, where it stuffs white paper or tissue into
the artist's ear. In cinematic-like movement, the woman (Souza herself) blows
fire out of her mouth and sets the castle in panel number 3 on fire.
Finally,
the panel Tiny Evils-Destruction, resolves the drama of this piece via a
reconciliation of the creative and the destructive impulses that exist inside
all people. Here the now familiar arm and hand reaches into the middle register
and with a scissor snips the right shoulder strap of the artist's dress. This
time Souza depicts herself with eyes turned directly toward the castle in
sub-panel 3. With paintbrush in hand, she is shown scribbling a cryptic red wavy
line on top of the edifice. This simple, spontaneous, and seemingly unconscious
act of creation unifies and cleanses the narrative with a tone of innocence.
After
contemplating these box paintings, animated with such craft and incendiary
imagination, we anticipate the future work of this very talented artist.
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