Angry Christ

PILGRIMAGE TO VICTORIAS. Watching a stage play can inspire a sudden urge to travel. The sinakulo, an outdoor theater that reenacts the moving scenes from the passion and death of Christ have inspired pilgrims to walk the same road leading to Jesus’ crucifixion in Golgota. Whether pilgrimages were made in faraway Jerusalem or close-to-home Mount Banahaw, pilgrims were driven by a strong desire to give reverence to places made sacred by a touch from an intrepid saint or by a life-changing miracle.

There is no saint or miracle in the sugar town of Victorias, Negros Occidental but after watching the Angry Christ, a celebrated stage play by Floy Quintos, I made sure that my tour itinerary includes seeing the pulsating tropical colors and psychedelic patterns applied by the artist Alfonso Ossorio on the walls of St. Joseph the Worker Parish.

VICTORIAS MILLING COMPANY. It was providential that Negrense sculptor Joe Geraldo offered to host my day one in Negros Occidental because I will find out later on my visit to his studio that his art-making may have been influenced by Ossorio as seen in the swirling patterns and inherent angst of his terracotta sculptures. 

From Silay airport, we sped off on motorbikes to Victorias. Our little motorcade revved on. We zoomed on good roads that cut through the immense cane fields of the Sugarlandia and raced against trucks loaded with sugarcane. After half an hour, we finally arrived at Victorias Milling Company compound, reputedly the largest sugarcane mill and refinery in the world, it was owned by the landed Ossorio family. Past the guard house, the smell of burnt molasses permeated the air in the sugar factory. Behind the carabao sundial with overly enlarged horns that serves as the dial face was the Ossorio Chapel.

THE OSSORIO CHAPEL. A few years after World War II, the Ossorios commissioned the famous New York architect Antonin Raymond to design a church for their sugar workers. The church was dedicated to Saint Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus and patron saint of laborers, carpenters and those who work on wood.

Modern and simple for a period dominated by Baroque style and traditional design in church architecture, the chapel of the Ossorios was a plain concrete structure. Its facade is adorned with an assemblage of broken bits of cerveza bottles that formed scenes from the life of Saint Joseph. There is also a large mural depicting the Last Supper and Pentecost on the exterior wall. These were designed by the Belgian Baroness Adelaide de Bethune.

FILIPINIZED IMAGES. Bethune’s work continues in the brass plates in the pulpit and baptistry with details depicting brown-skinned Biblical characters.

This Filipinized version of imported religious characters are repeated particularly in the wooden bass relief of the Station of the Cross with military men that alludes to the oppressor Pontius Pilate and statues of Saint Micheal, Mary and Joseph dressed in Filipino brown and native fashion by sugar farm worker and wood carpenter Benjamin Valenciano.

LO AND BEHOLD, THE ANGRY CHRIST. No Baroque retablo but a sight to behold at the main altar is the mural of the Last Judgement with a central Christ figure having glaring blue eyes, outstretched arms and flaming heart while crushing a devil’s skull that looked like a calavera from Mexico’s Dia de los Muertosbetween his feet. He is flanked by his parents Mary and Joseph, grandparent San Joaquin and Sta. Ana. God the Father represented by red orange hands sticking out from the Holy Spirit that resemble a Mayan bird and the all-seeing eye above.

All these vibrant swirls, colors, and horror vacuii inspired the playwright and fellow pilgrim Floy Quintos to stage a play about the thirty year old artist, Ossorio who flew from New York in the late 1940s to his family’s sugar estate in Victorias to apply his art in the chapel that his family built for their sugar workers.

EPILOGUE: CLOSING SCENE. The Quintos’ Angry Christ recounts the eleven months Ossorio labored in sleepless experimentation on applying wax to his design studies, flashbacks with his artist friends and influences Jackson Pollock and Jean Debuffet, the spiritual struggles with homosexual insecurity and the resistance he faced in expressing his avant garde style to a Filipino audience who was foreign to his art.

That morning, I positioned myself just below that skylight of Ossorio Chapel to recall that unforgettable closing scene from the stage play where the intrepid artist Ossorio who nears saintly status for his contribution to the world of art stands staring at his masterpiece, the Angry Christ -a miracle worth a pilgrimage to Victorias.

-2018 Easter Sunday