The Tantalized

The present work is a rare and important painting from a breakthrough series executed by the artist in Paris in 1951. Ossorio spent most of this year in Paris, developing a close personal and aesthetic relationship with Jean Dubuffet. The Tantalized combines Pollock's drip technique with the frontality and rawness of Dubuffet's women from his Corps de Dame series. It was Dubuffet who "showed Ossorio how a consciously intended image could be abstracted down to its most primitive, gut essentials, and presented by the medium in the bluntest possible manner" (F. V. O'Connor, Alfonso Ossorio: The Child Returns, New York 1999, pp. 8-9). Ossorio's best works from this period (of which there are approximately 20 extant), have figural overtones which dissolve into hallucinogenic skeins of paint that have a density and a visceral quality that is uniquely Ossorio's.