Glorious Ossorio

While the work of Jackson Pollock is all about bravado and expenditure of masculine energy, the work of Alfonso Ossorio is calibrated and controlled. Pollock’s is the Big Bang; Ossorio’s is the cooling of the universe.

Melting bands of color, flicks and webs of tractable light, a supernova of a shape in the heart of the composition: these are just a few of the elements that constitute the visual philosophy of Alfonso Ossorio. For half a century, he was striking against the surface of things, digging deep in search of a kind of spiritual truth that both embraced momentum and stillness, origin and destination. His every work suggests a vigorous unlearning of established visual idioms to come up with an abstraction at once fresh and restorative.

Ossorio, whose centenary is being

celebrated this year, was a legendary figure during his lifetime. He was the champion and devout practitioner of Abstract Expressionism, an obsessive gardener, the Great Gatsby of the Hamptons. He is also the subject of “Afflictions of Glory,” a definitive exhibition of his works that concludes today at León Gallery (G/F Corinthian Plaza, Paseo De Roxas, Makati City).

Among his contemporaries — this, during the boom of post-war America — he cut a unique, contradictory figure. The result of a confluence of various cultures (he was born in the Philippines, educated in the United Kingdom and stayed, for the rest of his life, in New York), he was the man about town who remained as the perpetual outsider, the peripatetic aesthete also identified with his self-created enclave called the Creeks, the artist little acknowledged during his lifetime but also happened to be obscenely rich.

“He was (also) tormented,” says Liliane Rejante Manahan, who co-curated the show with Lisa Guerrero Nakpil. “The rationale behind (the show’s title) is that his pain, his affliction is actually what fueled all of this.”

On the surface, one can look at his paintings — majority of the 15 on display — as seismic registers of intense, deliberate vision and firework explosions of feeling. While the work of Pollock — Ossorio’s close friend — is all about bravado and expenditure of masculine energy (his works are not referred to as “action paintings” for nothing), Ossorio’s is calibrated and controlled — dense and lush, yes, but also teeming with pockets of dark matter. Pollock’s is the Big Bang; Ossorio’s is the cooling of the universe.

But it would be a mistake to see his work as mere records of a psychological and emotional crisis. Unlike fellow Ab-Ex painters, Ossorio still retained a measure of figuration whose pivot was a kind of reckoning of faith. He was, after all, the man who painted the “Angry Christ,” the interpretation of the Last Judgment of Christ that still startles and confounds from the walls of St. Joseph the Worker Chapel in Victorias, Negros Occidental. “Afflictions of Glory” reminds us of this with a model sketch.

“What is special about the exhibition,” says Manahan, “aside from that there’s a mass of 15 works, if we look at them one by one, we realize that very significant periods of his body of work are represented in the whole collection.”

Starting with his figurative period in the ’40s, the show proceeds to his adventures into the drips and splatters of Ab-Ex and his sure-footed experiments into Art Brut (highlighted by a watercolor-and-ink painting featured in a book by Jean Dubuffet), moves toward his explorations of the materiality of paint and his “congregations” (Ossorio’s version of the assemblage) and finds terminus in his lyrical interpretations of his beloved garden. With 15 paintings and one congregation (notice the religious connotation), “Afflictions of Glory” captures the arc of the artist’s creative journey.

“The curatorial stand,” says Nakpil, “is that we want to reframe him as a Filipino. His pioneering methods (wax-resist technique) were arrived at when he was here in the Philippines. With the rise of Filipino and Southeast Asian artists in the West, they are now looking for their own patron saint, someone they can identify with.”

Only time will tell whether Ossorio’s star will shine further in the coming years but, as the narrative of “Affliction of Glory” suggests, we are just beginning to strike against the surface of Ossorio’s glorious, incandescent vision.

“Cross” reveals the materiality of paint through impasto as well as Ossorio’s meditation on the spiritual qualities of negative space and luminous, abstract forms.

Featuring the wax- resist method, “Unknown Woman,” which Alfonso Ossorio painted in 1951, was one of his initial forays into Art Brut, an artistic movement that attempted to capture the rawness and originality of artistic vision.

Through this work from the 1980s, Ossorio captured the energy of his walk through his famed garden in the Hamptons.