SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Souza’s Recent Work Savors Distortion of the Experienced World

Connecting dots to form a picture is an elementary game--kids’ play. But, as Al Souza’s work reveals, the process mimics the more sophisticated--though subconscious--method of joining diverse bits of information into a coherent whole.

Souza, who recently moved from Dallas to serve as visiting professor at San Diego State University, has been poking and prodding the nature of perception for more than a decade. He has challenged the medium of photography to uphold its reputation for truth and accuracy only to conclude that all forms of representation are lies, distortions of the experienced or imagined world. Souza’s recent work, on view at Mark Quint Contemporary Art, savors this tantalizing fact, turning it over and over again to examine its curious and conventional manifestations. The show, open by appointment only (454-3409), closes on Dec. 20.

In “Imagine (Illusion),” Souza undermines two forms of illusion so common that they are taken for granted. In the upper canvas of this two-part painting, he enlarges a fragment of the black-and-white dot pattern used in most printing processes. In its practical form, the density of black dots varies to convey the illusion of light, shadow and depth. By enlarging the pattern here in paint, Souza sacrifices its potential for illusion, and emphasizes its fundamental, abstract nature.

In the lower canvas, the word “illusion” appears in blood-red block letters on a solid-gold ground. Again, Souza calls attention to the use of illusion in the most basic modes of communication: the letters of the word are there indirectly, by implication, for Souza has painted only their shadows.

Souza sends volleys of doubt, humor and perplexity from eye to mind throughout his work. Each facet of his paintings doubles as something else. An illustration of a South Sea Islander in “Hat Trick,” for example, conveys information about its subject as much as it questions the method by which that information is conveyed.

The text surrounding the image, which was lifted from a textbook of some sort, has been cut off, denying it any clarity or continuity. Two other illustrations--of a man in a top hat and three others balancing on a see-saw--have similarly been divorced from their contexts and layered to make a tight sandwich of loosely related images.

As in the work of Vernon Fisher (like Souza, the subject of an exhibition at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in recent years), fragmented images and words temporarily coalesce, if only to mirror the disjunctive quality of life and to make the viewer aware of the process of perception. Souza’s work, less overtly autobiographical than Fisher’s, is also slightly more focused on the nature of representation, abstraction, and the transmission of information. He derives many of his images from instructional sources such as textbooks and handbooks. Designed to be straightforward and clear, the images become pawns in Souza’s conceptual games, their original function subverted by the artist’s fragmentation and manipulation. The clarity that Souza extracts from these sources is left to the viewer to restore.

In many cases, that process of decoding and untangling seems to be the raison d’etre of the work. In “Two Face,” for instance, Souza overlaps two portraits, one painted in full, naturalistic color, the other outlined in black. The two faces tilt at opposite diagonals and, together, they cancel each other in a muddied X. With effort, the features of each face can be distinguished, but the process yields nothing enlightening about its subject.

In “Stupid Rock,” two images are not overlaid but paired in stacked canvases. The top image, painted in thick patches of black and white, occupies the tenuous ground between abstraction and representation. From afar, one can discern a dog sniffing the ground. Up close, that image disintegrates into a swarm of gestural brushwork. Floating discs of color fill the canvas below, and these, too, cohere into recognizable form (the number 45) only at a distance or by squinting.

In the end, Souza’s work is more satisfying for what it encourages us to do than for what it offers us to see. It prompts an intense self-consciousness of the way we see and the way we absorb information visually, despite the fact that images deceive us every day, everywhere.