Untitled (I)
ca. 1950
watercolor and wax on drawing
27” x 20 1/4” (69 cm x 51 cm)

Provenance:
Private Collection, USA

Literature:
Manahan, Liliane Rejante and Reyes, Cid, Alfonso
Ossorio: Grazing Light. Leon Gallery, Inc, 2017, pp. 57-58
(Illustrated).
Ottmann, Klaus and Manahan, Liliane Rejante, Alfonso
Ossorio: A Survey 1940-1989. Ayala Foundation, Inc., 2018
(Illustrated).

Exhibited:
Leon Gallery, “Alfonso Ossorio: Grazing Light”,
21 April to 12 May 2017, Makati City, Philippines
Ayala Museum, “Alfonso Ossorio: A Survey 1940-1989”,
26 February to 17 June 2018, Makati City, Philippines.

By the dawn of the early 1950’s, Alfonso Ossorio began a friendship with French artist Jean Dubuffet whose works of art brut (raw art) enthralled Ossorio towards textured appearance with thick impasto of soot and tar. For him, the works of Dubuffet provided an artistic outlet free from expressions and rudimentary conventions from his earlier figurative works. Dubuffet and by association with their mutual friends Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Ossorio produced a series of watercolor and wax drawings that freed the artist from the captive presence of form contained unto paper that later progressed into his large-scale abstractions.

In this undated and untitled wax drawing done between the 1950’s, Ossorio experimented with Pollock’s technique of flick painting; but is kept within the confinement along the borders of the paper. Here, the artist composes his abstractions through a significant layering of colors that have been blended in a manner that does not bore one’s vision and is complimentary to each of them. In the process, the figure of a jovial monster-like creature is formed in the midst of the work catching the viewer’s attention in order pull us into the composition. For Ossorio’s wax drawings, his art of a very childlike quality grasped from the art and philosophy of his friend Dubuffet questions our very definitive concepts of what truly is art in the modern sense.