By Mat Gleason
Have you been around precision instruments? They are not exactly art but they are like art. They have specific uses which require that their appearance is immediately comprehended by the user. Art is almost the opposite; it requires incomprehension to trigger the imagination. Even if the artist wants you to land on the spot of their intention, it is just well-designed illustration if there is no bafflement involved.
The paintings of Alyson Souza liberally borrow from assemblage to set the scene where the unimagined combinations of organic and mechanical manifest. A cabbage marries a rotating air ventilator, an artichoke is heavy-wired light bulb. You needn’t worry about these experiments electrocuting you or overturning the fundamental rules of physics. A great poet once sang “To live outside the law you must be honest” and Souza’s pictures live way beyond the laws of measurement, gravity, geometry, subatomic corporeal structure, and most of the rest of the floor of the public library housing books on these and related subjects.
Nature looks messy but the organic has a harmony that matches any machine and a vitality that surpasses it. There may be a world one day run by artificial intelligence but it will not surpass the beauty of what composes vegetation and, unlike Alyson Souza, never grasp the tender juxtaposition of disparate methods that humans and the earth mold into functional aesthetics and absurd visual journeys embarked on for their own lustful sake. These are sensuous paintings to be savored as a salad of preposterous principals.