1953 / Oil on canvas / 50.5 x 39.5 cm / Artist: Galo B. Ocampo / Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Collection

World War II left a lasting mark on Ocampo’s art. The danger he went through as a guerrilla and the holocaust he witnessed would haunt him even after the war. The imagery of his Flagellantes series, to which this painting belongs, evokes the suffering and terror of the war years. Central to this series is the Christ figure, crowned with thorns and face covered by the flagellant’s veil, while around and above him, fighter planes wreak havoc on human life and civilization as symbolized by classical columns or arcades.

In this painting, three hooded flagellants beat their bare backs with a whip. As in a dream, the figures are not in a natural setting of country roads or city streets; instead they are in a symbolic submerged landscape where the sea floor, littered with marine creatures, coincides with the tiled floor of a church.

The flagellants symbolize sinful human beings in search of salvation in a ritual of purification—and water is the purifying element after the horrors of war—or pilgrims in quest of the truth. The arches create rhythmic intervals indicating the passage of time, and the measured distances of the reducing figures reinforce the sense of the temporal dimension; thus the quest for freedom and salvation is a long and historical process. On another plane, the blue-green depths in which the flagellants move signify the submerged subconscious’ realm that they probe in order to gain understanding of themselves.