Manuel Ocampo. Bad Painting

Born in Quezon City in 1965, Manuel Ocampo moved at age twenty to the United States, where he briefly studied at California State University, Bakersfield, before dropping out to work at McDonald’s and paint at night. He credits his mother—a journalist—for encouraging his career as a professional artist by asking him to draw editorial cartoons for her newspaper. He later worked for a Catholic priest to create facsimiles of Spanish colonial paintings. Simulating the wear that would typically appear on true antiques, the experience led the artist to seriously question the ethics, power, and credibility of history painting. Such experiences informed his stylistic approach, which includes cartoonish illustrations, large text, and bold religious figuration. Ocampo often calls his work “bad painting”¹—a term coined by curator Marcia Tucker in her 1978 exhibition of the same name to describe painting that deforms the figure and uses fantastic and irreverent content to reject conventional attitudes about art.² In his large-scale confrontational paintings, the artist deploys art-historical and literary references and iconography like crucifixes, emoticons, and sausages that pile up to amass complex meaning. As the artist explains, “For me a painting is something that goes beyond thought. It’s sort of like an accumulator of thought . . . at the limits of language.”³