By Paul Ryan, ART PAPERS
Staunton, Virginia

Al Souza’s puzzle “paintings” (Reynolds Gallery, July 10—August 24) are actually assemblages that he constructs from multiple, found jigsaw puzzles. Yet, within the blurred boundaries and permissiveness of our post-painting era, and particularly through the work’s smart (and sometimes accidental) links to various strains of modernist painting, “painting” is an appropriate and perhaps more accurate description. With the exception of two small-scale works each painting in the exhibition, like the startling 18-foot-long The Peaceful Kingdom that was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, consists of thousands of related and unrelated puzzle pieces that are assembled and glued together. Obsessive constructions consisting of multiple images, the paintings are object like, turgid oceans possessing islands and partial continents of the pictorial. The rippling, unified space of each composition announces an image-based theme—pop stars, museum masterpieces, cartoon celebrities, the terrain of fast food packaging, postcard landscapes; and, Souza’s playful/critical aestheticization of the material excesses of late capitalism provides conceptual drive.

Though lacking the inimitable resonance of painterly skin, the effect of the general consistency in scale, shape, and surface of each individual puzzle piece (the homogeneity of Souza’s medium) combined with the ever-present, inevitable hairline organic grids of reassembled portions of puzzles creates a texture that is equivalent to the fields of brushstrokes that comprise the surface of an Impressionist painting by, say Pissarro or a Post-Impressionist wok by Seurat. When viewed from the side, the span of layered, planar puzzle fragments, highlighted by the tricking flow of their irregular serrated edges, suggest (though is not aesthetically parallel to) the paint build-up of an expressionist painting by the likes of Frank Auerbach or Joan Snyder. The artist’s use of all-overness, large scale (the best pieces are large), and repetition of process echoes some of the formal practices of Jackson Pollock.

Within the work’s grinding opticality there is a skillful balance of fun and seriousness, as well as a permeating formal unity. This eye-popping clam is the product of Souza’s eye for design and his understanding of the space of planar surfaces, whether the ground is a photographic image (the puzzle images are photographs) or a painted field (the visual effect of the compositions). Often employing a distinct figure-ground relationship—the figures are assembled portions of puzzles, and the ground is usually a mixture of layered, disconnected and unrelated individual puzzle pieces—Souza has established more of a leveling out of forms within four of the works. In Pell-Mell, a swirling potpourri of interacting fragments of prominent paintings from different centuries and cultures, and even all-overness and the puzzle parts’ uniform semi-glossy surfaces coalesce to leave the aesthetic hierarchies of art history and criticism behind. Rough Cut is a moderate size of work brimming with a dense stack of horizontal bands of flora imagery. Each band, stretching the width of the composition, suggests the form of a crosscut saw. The shape relationships of the multiple notched edges of the puzzle parts and the intrinsic active color contrasts suggest constant motion—the ongoing clear-cutting of our planet’s forest and destruction of natural habitats for numerous species. Usually ends in themselves, Souza has remarkably transformed jigsaw puzzles and the visual and manual exercises they invite into an uncommon means. That is, he has redefined this toy of cottage and rainy day pastimes as an artistic medium with unique physical attributes and inherent content determined by each puzzle’s picture and the function of puzzle(s) as metaphor. A timely simple/complex move that incorporates issues of photography and painting, accessibility, and a meshing together of high and low that nearly seems effortless, these paintings undoubtedly have many artists asking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”