Painted Dispatches From Abroad

Controversy throws a powerful spotlight, and as a young artist, Philippines-born Manuel Ocampo got the full treatment. Painting in a style that approximated Spanish colonial art and used vivid imagery that borrowed freely from Catholicism, Western history and current events, he had his first commercial one-man show at the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Santa Monica in early 1991. His paintings were rife with skulls, crosses, devils and hooded priests--attempts to capture, as he said then, “an apocalyptic vision of these evil times.” He was 25.

A year later, he was invited to the prestigious showcase of contemporary art Documenta in Germany. However, three of the four works he sent were deleted from the exhibition because they prominently featured swastikas. That same year, he was one of 16 artists in MOCA’s “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the ‘90s,” a provocative and influential show that headlined such “bad boys” of the art scene as Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden.

Shortly thereafter, Ocampo was being hailed as the hottest young Filipino artist in America. But, he says, he found the heat too intense.

‘It’s a difficult thing, a lot of responsibility,” says Ocampo, 36, speaking by phone from Berlin, where he was one of 46 artists invited to the Berlin Biennale this year. “I wasn’t really at the top, it felt uncomfortable. I’m not really there or I don’t feel like I’m there, but people perceive me as there.”

So when he won a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome in 1995, he happily left for Europe, where he stretched his sojourn to 41/2 years, most of them spent in Seville, Spain. He returned to the U.S. in 1999--this time to Berkeley.

During his time abroad, he had several gallery shows in the U.S.--including a retrospective at Track 16 in Santa Monica in 1997--and in Europe. Now he’s putting his European connection--and the work he has made in the year--up for view in L. A. An exhibition called “Les Chiens Andalous” (The Andalusian Dogs), which includes 14 works by Ocampo and 30 by three of his artist friends from Spain, opened Saturday at Track 16.

Born into upper-middle-class comfort in the Philippines, Ocampo came to the U. S. in the mid-’80s, supporting himself with various odd jobs in order to draw and paint. After Fred Hoffman spotted his artwork at the L. A. Art Fair in 1990, he put on a one-man show for Ocampo. At about the same time, Ocampo became a full-time artist.

He recognizes that timing had something to do with his early success. During the early 1990s, the art world embraced multiculturalism and identity politics. “I guess since I have a sort of nonwhite, non-Western point of view, they lumped me into that group,” Ocampo said in an LA Weekly interview in 1997, “and I guess that helped to create interest.”

Given his imagery, symbols, and even his titles, it remains hard to avoid reading sociopolitical import into his early works. “Untitled (Burnt-Out Europe)” (1992) was one of the works censored from Documenta IX, and it depicts Christ, with the body of a hawk, floating over a courtyard where horned demons (Nazis perhaps?) prowl. Flanked by two large yellow swastikas, his forehead is bleeding from a crown of thorns.

In response to being partially excised from Documenta, Ocampo executed one of his most virulent paintings, “Why I Hate Europeans” (1992), in which demonic figures dance in a circle before a map of an unidentified country. A panel from a box of real shoe cream--Hollywood Sani-white--has been affixed to the lower right of the painting.

Anti-Christian, anti-colonial, anti-white? Ocampo avoids all labels, including that of “Filipino artist.”

‘I’m aware of the fact that people will read these paintings [a certain way],” he says. “That wasn’t my intention, but anyway, artists’ intentions are always ignored.”

So what were his intentions? Ocampo deflects the question. “I don’t really know,” he replies. “It’s one thing I’m trying to find out, what my intention was.”

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During his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Ocampo received invitations from several Spanish institutions--to teach, to do workshops, to make artwork. “By then, a lot of Spanish museums had bought my works. They knew I was in Rome and they invited me to come.”

One of those who courted him was Antonio Garcia Bascon, director of the Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art, based in Seville. The artist first visited the city during Holy Week, when the penitentes in their tall hoods filled the streets in religious parades.

Ocampo and his wife, Sherry Apostol, were impressed, not only with the pageantry of that festival, but with the general ambience of the city. “When we came to Seville we just felt comfortable with the place,” he says. “It was so different from what we had known before, and it was also very slow, really relaxed. We liked the fact you can just walk everywhere.”

They moved to Seville in 1996, staying for 31/2 years and soaking up a different kind of artistic life. “I’ve had more shows in Europe than in the States,” Ocampo says. “It’s a tradition with the galleries to nurture an artist or to get to know them on a personal level, and not so much [emphasis] on the business.”

Yes, his work changed while living abroad. “I think it’s still baroque but not so evidently so,” he reflects. “There’s a lot of hybrid elements now; there’s a lot of ambiguity; there’s a lot of openness now. Before, the baroque element was a formal thing; now, it’s the content, the meaning.”

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Ocampo chose the other three artists in “Les Chiens Andalous’--Patricio Cabrera, Chema Cobo and Curro Gonzalez--but emphasizes that they are not his “discoveries.” All have well-established careers in Spain, and all became Ocampo’s friends during his stay in Andalusia.

The exhibition’s title is taken from “Un Chien Andalou,” by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. The Surrealist film is famous for a scene showing an eye slit open, a metaphor for the power of art. Ocampo gleefully points out that the film, in fact, had no dogs and had nothing to do with Andalusia. “If I were to be truthful, the title of this show would be ‘Three Andalusians and a Dog-Eater,’ ” he teasingly writes in the exhibition catalog, in reference to a Filipino slur. “After all, I did live there for three-and-a-half years. . . .”

Among Ocampo’s works are a series of six medium-sized paintings, very enigmatic, of a man’s hand holding out a blank card. Careful lettering spells out phrases such as “The Failure to Express Is Its Expression” and “Comprehensible Only to a Few Initiates.” Text is a major component of the other, larger paintings as well, with one recent work featuring a signboard stuck in a kind of Surrealist lawn. Written in Spanish, it translates as “Presenting the Undisclosed System of References in the Loophole of Misunderstanding.”

Ocampo gives a little laugh when the phrases are repeated to him. He says that because he couldn’t watch much TV in Spain--it was mostly dreary, subtitled imports from the United States and Mexico--he started reading and rereading books on art theory. When he told a friend how much trouble he was having understanding the dense texts, his friend suggested, “Read it like science-fiction.”

Ocampo suddenly began to enjoy the words. “They’re like poetry, they’re like noise,” the artist says. And he interwove them into his paintings, sometimes cranking up the obscurity factor.

Another painting, by Ocampo and Gonzalez, one of his neighbors in Seville, is called “Noli me tangere” (Touch Me Not). Based on a traditional scene from Christian art, it depicts Ocampo as the Christ figure and Gonzalez, prostrate at his feet, as the sinful Mary Magdalene, feeling herself unworthy to be touched by such a holy man. Floating overhead are a gaggle of dissonant elements--a platter of what looks like intestines, a couple of bottles of San Miguel beer.

Gonzalez painted the figures, Ocampo the objects. Ocampo chuckles when the work is mentioned. The central conceit was Gonzalez’s. “He was interested [in the subject] because of me being Filipino, and the history between Spain and the Philippines,” he recalls. “It’s a lot of just jokes and references to Philippines and Spanish history. Curro is being sarcastic.”

Gonzalez’s own work, like that of the other two Spaniards, could be called Surrealist. In an essay in the show catalog, he points to Goya as a key influence, then later refers to Bunuel and Dali. His intricately painted tableaux--some are 8 by 10 feet--depict such scenes as a circus clown shot through a banner onto a leaping mule in “The Fall” or a man carrying a portable organ topped with two giant eyeballs in “The Player.” In his recent works on paper, Cobo explores what he calls “the inversion of the obvious,” with the subject rather loosely revolving around issues of power and colonialism. Eyes keep cropping up in his works too--one on the side of a top hat in “What’s Behind the Scene” or 30 crammed into a section of “Maps Look at You.”

Cabrera uses more pattern in his explorations of the subconscious on canvas and paper. In “The Weight of Your Body,” an uplifted pair of hands mingles with snails, a fetus and geometric shapes in the ether.

Ocampo is sharing the show with the three because, he says, “they’re my friends, and I’ve always admired their works.”

In 1999, Ocampo and his wife returned to the U.S., to Northern California this time. “Because my wife’s from Berkeley,” he explains, “and it was a smooth transition from Seville to Berkeley. It’s a more relaxed pace, there’s a lot of smart people there, so it’s very stimulating. In some sense I got tired with the preoccupation with glamour in Los Angeles, and stuff like that.”

In his new hometown, he keeps a low profile. He does not have a gallery in the Bay Area--he’s represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and OMR in Mexico City--or show there.

“I’m involved with the art community, but I’m not caught up in the art politics there,” he says. “People don’t know what my work is. There’s a certain distance, and I like that. It helps me work better.” Sometimes, it’s better to be out of the glare.

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“LES CHIENS ANDALOUS,” Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building C1, Santa Monica. Dates: Through June 23. Phone: (310) 264-42678.