Description

A Calculated Charade reflects Manuel Ocampo’s trademark use of irony, symbolism, and layered critique. The title hints at performance and hypocrisy, echoing his ongoing commentary on political, cultural, and religious systems. While little public record exists on this specific work, it likely continues his use of provocative juxtapositions—sacred and profane, grotesque and comic—to unsettle viewers and resist simple interpretation. Like much of his art, the piece plays with ambiguity, drawing the audience into a chaotic but deliberate visual language that questions authority, belief, and identity.

About the Artist

Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965, Quezon City) is a Filipino painter whose neo-expressionist practice combines Baroque religious iconography with secular and political critique. Trained at the University of the Philippines and California State University, Bakersfield, he rose to prominence in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1990s and gained international recognition through exhibitions such as Documenta IX, the Venice Biennale, and Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s. His paintings use provocative symbols such as swastikas, crucifixes, cartoon imagery, and scatological elements to confront colonial history, religion, and cultural identity. By fusing the grotesque with the comical, Ocampo creates works that resist fixed meaning and remain deliberately unstable, with banner-like canvases that borrow from Philippine jeepney art, European modernism, and satirical illustration to push against the boundaries of taste while exposing contradictions in society and the art world itself.

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