We know who the Filipino American Alfonso Angel Yangco Ossorio (1916–1990) was—a prominent Abstract Expressionist painter and a friend to both Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, the latter of whom regarded him as a fellow art brut master. But who was Nandor Fodor (1895–1964)? He was an authority on paranormal phenomena but eventually broke with the spiritualists, explaining mediumship in psychoanalytic terms. There is no evidence of him having worked with Freud, but he became knowledgeable enough about psychoanalysis to publish on the subject in various journals. In 1949 he put out his tour de force, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-natal Conditioning. Ossorio was obsessed with Fodor’s tome; he kept an annotated copy of it on his bedside table until the end of his life. The exhibition’s title, “The Search for the Beloved,” referenced Fodor’s text, but the show itself focused on Ossorio’s paintings, mixed-media pieces, and works on paper, including the artist’s “Victorias Drawings,” 1950, which “directly address the contents of Fodor’s book through titles and imagery,” according to the gallery’s press release. The presentation also demonstrated Ossorio’s identification with the cult of Magna Mater—otherwise known as Cybele, the universal mother of ancient Roman mythology—and the violent miracle of creation.
“After nine months of peaceful development, the human child is forced into a strange world by cataclysmic muscular convulsions which, like an earthquake, shake its abode to the very foundations. . . . In its shattering effect, birth can only be parallelled by death,” Fodor wrote. Ossorio’s paintings feel the same—they are fraught with apocalyptic dread, their expressionistic gestures tumultuously muscular, repetitious, and ingeniously arbitrary, forming what psychoanalysts call a relational matrix, but one that is impenetrable, thick. Ossorio’s chthonic, central core–like imagery references what Goethe referred to as the “eternal feminine.” Fodor’s book was “a springboard from which to take off,” Ossorio said, and indeed he did, not only into the mother’s womb, but into what Freud called the maelstrom of the dynamic unconscious. Consider Generations II, 1951, an abstract arrangement of four painted wood panels joined together by thin metal rods. The composition calls to mind an ancient fertility figure, or an interstellar cloud in a distant corner of the universe. Its brutal facture implies that anxiety and creativity are related—that seriously original art can be spontaneously generated from a profound sense of unease.
The “Victorias Drawings” allude to a city in the province of Negros Occidental, Philippines, where, in 1950, Ossorio was commissioned to paint a liturgical mural—which came to be known as The Angry Christ—in Saint Joseph the Worker Parish Church. “[This piece is] a continual last judgment with the sacrifice of the mass that is the continual reincarnation of God coming into this world,” Ossorio declared. The mural, while disquieting, eventually turned Saint Joseph into a pilgrimage site. The exhibition’s display of a crucified Christ (a delicate ink-and-watercolor drawing titled Crucifix, 1942) and an exquisite 1941 ink-on-paper rendering of a suffering Job made Ossorio’s religiosity—his saving grace, as it were—clear. The two works suggested that the artist was involved in what in medieval times was known as an imitatio Christi, or an imitation of Christ, a tribute to the Holy Savior’s good works. To me, Ossorio’s art strongly implies that his Catholicism saved him from Pollock’s mental illness and tragic demise. He was clearly multitalented, an original type of religious artist.
Faith “must aim to inspire awe,” the artist said, and the congregation of works in this exhibition did just that. Ossorio was a high priest of art, preaching to the true believers.
