ART REVIEW : A Filipino Artist’s Portrait of Dominance and Submission

Manuel Ocampo was born in the Philippines one year before Ferdinand E. Marcos took power, 100 years after the United States became an ongoing military presence there and 400 years after Spain first colonized the islands, systematically erasing the indigenous culture and imposing Catholicism upon its inhabitants. Deeply personal and resolutely political, Ocampo’s art grapples not only with his country’s embattled history and piecemeal identity, but with the larger and more abstract mechanisms of dominance and submission.

Ocampo’s paintings at Salander-O’Reilly/Fred Hoffman Gallery are strange amalgams, grafting the crude idioms of Spanish colonial painting onto the urgent graphics of agitprop, the scarred surfaces of the political poster onto the smooth facade of the melodramatic imagination. Here, martyrs dance with fools, demons and snakes work their black magic, salivating fat-cats vomit mouthfuls of food, yellow-haired women winningly ooze corruption and toothy rats fight over a jumbo can of salmon.

The text “Anong Oras Na Pare?” is inscribed onto one of the paintings. In Tagalog, it means “What time is it?” In these paintings, it seems as though it’s always about 6 p.m., and it’s the last supper before the Apocalypse. But how to distinguish betrayer from betrayed? In the airless world Ocampo envisions, no one can say because no one is innocent.

In “Cooks in the Kitchen,” too many cooks aren’t spoiling the broth, they are disemboweling the customers--slitting open their stomachs and pulling out viscera and Visa cards, roasting them on spits and greedily funneling dollar bills from between their buttocks. The sun shines brightly upon this factory-cum-slaughterhouse. Over the heads of the busy butchers, Fidel Castro’s favorite slogan insists that “Obreros Producir Mas!” (“Workers Produce More!”)

What, however, are these workers producing? The black men and women in their starched aprons and hats seem to be taking revenge against their white oppressors; but where will the cycle of oppression end?

The work is both arch and guarded in posing the question. This attitude represents a change for Ocampo, who has always tended more toward hyperbole than irony, more toward hysteria than sophistication. The imagery is different too--less coded toward Third World politics, less glutted with religious symbolism, more Max Beckmann than folk retablo. One wonders if--and if so, to what extent--Ocampo has begun to reproduce the hegemonic discourse that has oppressed him. This is, certainly, a danger that comes with success. One hopes--one suspects--Ocampo will ride it out unscathed.

Salander-O’Reilly/Fred Hoffman Gallery, 456 N. Camden Dr., (310) 247-1500, through May 29. Closed Sunday and Monday.