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137.2 by 76.3 cm. (54 by 30 in.)

Signed and dated 'Souza 66' lower left and dated and inscribed '112/ Chance -- 1966/ oil on canvas 30 x 54' on reverse

Oil on canvas

NOTE

Souza 'often builds up an image by using a mass of loops and small circles of dark paint superimposed onto broad swathes of rich colour, so that although the image is never quite lost, its architectural formality dissolves into a kind of passionate dance.' (Mullins 1962, p.30).

The bold complex heads of the 1950s created with cross hatching gave way in the 1960s to a further distortion that resulted in complex mutated forms.

'If he was creating monsters, probably no one would be troubled; but because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead... why he paints mouths that stretch like hair combs across the face, and limbs that branch out like thistles. Souza's imagery is not a surrealist vision - a self-conscious aesthetic shock - so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations'. (ibid. 1962, p.39).

In an interview in 1991 'I have created a new kind of face. In The Last Supper, there are two or three faces and they are drawn in a completely new iconography, beyond Picasso. As you know, Picasso redrew the human face and they were magnificent. But I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms. And I am still a figurative painter... ' (Dalmia 2001, p.94).