Manuel Ocampo: Painting as an Attempt to Memorialize Reality’s Triumph over Art

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present the new work of Manuel Ocampo (*1965), the Filipino artist-painter based in Los Angeles. The viewer is invited to discover an expressive and gestural figurative painting. It is endowed with a shimmering palette, even synthetic or acidic and results in an intense pictorial experience.

Mixing iconography from the colonial era, symbols from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and popular imagery, Ocampo stages tragicomic subjects formed on the model of the comic strip. The images with their latent vulgarity appear deliberately subversive and decadent and offer similarities to the excessive aesthetics of the works of California's Paul McCarthy (*1945). The hybrid hysteria of the compositions is also punctuated with grotesque eroticism and sexuality. Going beyond the first level of reading, the ensemble of works reveals a complex vocabulary coded by the artist.
Thus, without falling into a constant cynicism, the offbeat humor of the artist asks questions related to the authenticity of the values established on artistic, religious, political, popular models, etc. and questions the possibilities of an apolitical art and devoid of any religiosity. In this way, he follows in the tradition of political allegorisms like Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) or Honoré Daumier (1808-1879). The narrative titles of his paintings - such as Painting - project for a monument dedicated to the triumph of art over reality - fully participate in the iconoclastic conceptualism, a fundamental vector in the art of Ocampo.

The artist's work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, including the IX Documenta in Kassel conceived by Jan Hoet in 1992. Also, Ocampo's work is present in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (Paris), the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand Duc Jean (Luxembourg), etc.