Provenance: Provenance: A gift from the artist Betty Parsons Gallery

Literature: Literature: Rejante-Manahan, Lilian and Cid Reyes. Alfonso Ossorio: Grazing Light. Leon Gallery, Makati City, 2017. p.54-55.

ABOUT THE WORK

There is hardly any equivalent of Ossorio’s retinal attack and spiritual siege in the other fields of art, now that Dali’s surrealism has been deemed kid’s stuff. Would Ken Russell, the filmmaker obsessed with sexuality and the Roman Catholic Church, pass the grade? In music, Arnold Schoenberg composed the violent, eerie, and disturbing “Pierrot Lunaire,” where atonal music made the moon “seem even more sick than tonal music could.” Both the work at hand and the beholder are regarded as a gathering of objects/people assembled for religious worship. Ossorio once said: “I feel that all serious art is a repository of the spirit.” The work in itself is an exposed storage place of these raw materials, fragments of a larger whole, from which they have been fiercely wrenched and violently torn away. Each piece, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, is a visible proof of its past, and now in his hands, each finds its future, searching its way, together with other detritus determined to assert itself. Ossorio systematically collected this mountainous multitude of objects sourced from various junk and industrial suppliers, and, like apostles, they heeded the words of the Master: “Come and follow me.” The viewer is unaware of the significance of each and every physical material, and that each carries with an emotional charge, an electrical psychological message beamed at him, each claiming his attention and affection. A sampling of some of these gewgaws and tchotchkes will awaken our awareness of them: “shells, bones, driftwood, nails, doll’s eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, children’s toys.” All this discarded rubble speaks volumes about the man and the artist that was Alfonso Ossorio. (Cid Reyes)