Never one to adhere to a specific medium or a style, Al Souza is a highly prolific and inventive artist who has worked in nearly every medium imaginable from painting, sculpture, photography, collage, and assemblage. Souza’s creations mark a critical yet playful assessment of the abundant, surplus materialities of American capitalism. In a decidedly Postmodern sense, the artist navigates the boundaries and definitions of our post-painting landscape. In this, the artist has created his highly original puzzle “paintings” such as the one seen here. Souza takes the common jigsaw puzzle as an aesthetic and conceptual framework from which he then carefully arranges onto board, removing any recognizable imagery from an original whole. In this way, the final piece is wholly separate from the title, bearing no significant relationship. These assemblages are full of color, energy, texture, and careful decision making. In this, the artist sees a new technique formed from an older painting tradition. Of his process, Souza explains, “I look at them structurally the same way a painter would. I usually have fragments of puzzle spread around on my studio floor, and then I get up on a ladder and make decisions. The whole room becomes my palette.” Souza lived and worked in Houston for many years, teaching art courses at the University of Houston from 1992–2009.

The puzzle painting titled Italian Castle works wonderfully as a Postmodern response to the Byzantine mosaic. Fragments of brightly colorful pieces are carefully arranged to make up one solid artwork that speaks to our abstracted, contemporary world. The puzzle paintings force the viewer to ask who specifically is the artist here? Souza assembles and x, however, the image itself is from an unknown photographer. Additionally, the “creator” of the work would normally be the person who completed the puzzle through the time consuming work of x the fragments into a cohesive product. However, Souza here claims that he is the artist—the un-finishing is the finishing. With Italian Castle, the two words bring forth images in our imaginations, and viewers search through each biomorphic puzzle piece (likely unsuccessfully) for the image we expect. In this playful act, Souza is teaching us lessons in abstraction and viewing. Souza inherits this playfulness combined with the critique of consumer society from Pop art, as he examines the virtual indistinction between high and low artforms. 

Al Souza was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1944 and currently resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. His early education included studying as a civil engineer. As a young artist, he attended the Art Students League in New York City, and later received his MFA from the University of Amherst in 1972. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. He was included in the Venice Biennial (1976); the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Artists’ Stamps and Stamp Images (1979-1980); the Sao Paolo Biennial (1981); the Whitney Biennial (2000), among many others. His work is part of numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Dallas Museum of Art; El Paso Museum of Art; Houston Airport System; New Orleans Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Parrish Art Museum; DeCordova Museum; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; and the University of Massachusetts. Souza was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Award (1979 and 1988); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1998); the Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Bellagio (2001); Texas Artist of the Year (2006); and the International Association of Art Critics/USA Award (2007), among others