Manuel Ocampo: Cuadros para un manicomio
Cuadros para un manicomio is the first solo exhibition of Manuel Ocampo (Philippines, 1965) at VETA Gallery by Fer Francés. The title itself jokingly anticipates possible interpretations of the show and, this is so, due to the motley imaginary that the artist manages together with a planned and false lack of seriousness that allows him to gather, in the same pictorial plane, interests of a vast historical, cultural and artistic spectrum.
Ocampo's work is aligned with the situation in his native country, a territory where, the artist argues, few things remain. The Philippines is a relatively new country historically shaken by successive colonizations (Spain, United States, Japan) and experiencing more typhoons than anywhere else. The debris of these disasters then become the materials of a new and diverse cultural heritage of necessarily brief memory. In several of Ocampo's paintings, the figure of the vulture appears, the carrion-eating bird par excellence, which must cunningly make food out of the corpse.
Faced with a hypersaturated contemporary semiosphere, Ocampo carries out a binge of signs that he disorganizes and returns without explicit digestion for the visitor. "By becoming the clown, you maintain your dignity" he explains. There is a freedom of expression before the king that the jester exclusively enjoys and whose humor resonates on different levels. Ocampo's pictorial space becomes a possible and confusing pictorial parresia in the sense that Foucault understood it, as well as a critical short-circuit to identifiable official narratives. The symbol oscillates then between abstraction and subversion, in the same way that the written form of a sentence can function as an aesthetic subterfuge without necessarily attending to the meaning suggested by its reading, but only to the silhouette and configuration of its letters.
Obvious influences such as Philip Guston, James Ensor or Francis Picabia, are found in his canvases with abundant references to literature, as well as with the eclectic aesthetics of imagery from subcultures and pseudo-sciences, but also Japanese iconography, Christian symbology and Western art history. Everything fits violently combined in a pictorial universe of overwhelming freedom and frequented by worms and vultures where "the line between chaos and order falls within the vision or perception of each one".
Manuel Ocampo is one of the most important artists in the Philippines. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world (Documenta IX in 1992, Venice Biennale in 1992 and 2002, Berlin Biennale in 2000, Lyon Biennale in 1998, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at MOCA...) and his work is present in the collections of major international museums.
