Daughter Shelley Souza, who manages the Souza Estate in New York, on the genesis of her father’s chemical alterations
The world’s first chemical was created on January 31, 1969. Its invention, like all inventions, arose out of necessity. In my father’s case, that necessity was the compulsion to paint. In his diary of that year, he noted, “an artist with no paint, with no money to buy paint, paints without paint. That’s how strong the creative process is, making something out of nothing.”
I think, in the first place, it’s important to recognise that it is next to impossible to come up with something original. It is an extraordinary achievement for an artist to create a type of art that previously did not exist.
In the case of the chemicals, first my father had to find a chemical solvent that would dissolve the print of the magazine page without destroying the paper. Second, he had to use his mastery of colour and form not only to “destroy” the print with the chemical solvent but then to come up with a new “paint” palette from the dissolving inks. And he had to envision, before he began, how he would redefine an existing icon (the original image on the magazine paper) into an original idea, not merely a derivative one.
If you can imagine for a moment the complexity of thought required to achieve the few steps I’ve described above, you may begin to intuit how far forward my father’s thinking had to be when he invented the chemical. And how only an artist of his stature could have come up with such an audacious invention in the first place.
In addition to the purely creative process described above, the chemicals also served as a platform on which my father dialogued with multiple cultures: The fantastical (landing a man on the moon), the increasing influence of eroticism in American culture, his discovery of the mystical in the Bhagavad Gita, his interest in Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement, and so on.
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The biggest misunderstanding a collector (or critic) can arrive at, is trying to compare a chemical to a drawing. That’s like trying to compare a factory to a residential house. Both may be built with bricks and mortar but that’s where the similarity in design and function ends. Similarly, while the support for a drawing and a chemical is paper, their design and function are as dissimilar as a dwelling house and a factory. Drawings are intensely personal for Souza, the chemicals are largely public. And their means of creation are equally dissimilar. It is much more accurate to compare a chemical with a painting on paper; while simultaneously considering how much more complicated it is to create a chemical than simply rendering an idea on to a blank sheet of paper using regular paints.
I personally think that chemicals are like jewels glittering on the roadside, gathering dust, while collectors walk by unaware of their originality and exquisite imagination.
The chemicals are not only important in my father’s oeuvre; they were also, conceptually, so far ahead of their time, it is only recently, with the advent of digital art, that younger artists are beginning to experiment with creating multiple narratives by layering of multiple imagery. This layering of multiple narratives is currently part of the cutting edge post-modern contemporary art. Yet, my father began experimenting with this idea 40 years ago with the invention of the chemicals, and continued his experiment until his death.