Angry Christ Mural The centerpiece of the St. Joseph the Worker Parish Church in Victorias City, Negros Occidental, is the 60-square-meter liturgical mural entitled "The Angry Christ" (1950).
Congregations assemblage, 1967 In 1958, Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) began to experiment, incorporating found objects into his oil paintings. He initially introduced these items discreetly, but by 1959, buttons, shards, mirrors, fake gems, ropes and other miscellaneous objects often covered his surfaces. Oil had been replaced by plastic as the primary matrix, and soon after, painting was rejected for gathering. While artists like friend Jean Dubuffet often refer to their low-relief composites as assemblages, Ossorio coined the term “congregation,” a word with obvious ecclesiastical associations and that resonated with the artist's lifelong engagement with Catholicism. While “assemblage” emphasizes the cohesiveness of a group of elements, “congregation” conveys the multiplicity of unique entities within the work as a whole. Such a shift in focus complements Ossorio's own understanding of religion: “Religion must aim to inspire awe, to awe man with the splendor of his existence. By a set of unexpected juxtapositions, it must put you in a state of realization of how splendid things can be, even if they are horrible.” In his congregations, Ossorio created the unexpected by synthesizing forms of beauty with those of decay, by contrasting refinement with crudeness. For Ossorio, all objects had life, and bringing together disparate, ordinary elements, he also found a way to fuse art and spirituality. Ossorio continued to create daring congregations until his death in 1990. == References ==