Manuel Ocampo presents at MO_Space an exhibition of paintings, both seductive and profane, that employs pattern and decoration as a strategy for abstraction assembled to make a still-life representation of erotic desire and existential ennui, touching death.

With covetous itch, eyes are caught by the trace of an enigmatic gesture—one that is veiled but choreographed and distinct, producing enough suggestive patterns to arouse a thousand senses. The decorative pattern pulsating across the space of the paintings immediately grabs attention in ways that cuckold the convention of appearances from the stigma of everyday utility: it is an abstraction that alienates things from the yoke of description, from their domestic abuse in the service of provisionary happiness and well-being, knowing fully well that artificial bonds bloom from psychological mishaps, producing fetishes to dampen the never-ending quest for affection, acceptance, acknowledgment, and ass.

This arrangement is an ordered universe that follows logic inverted to create a fresh look on painful pleasures, a traumatizing banality extending towards the ends of known memory plumbed to eradicate false ideals and forgotten idols, a forward regression towards naiveté as mad and insouciant as the last form of resistance against duplicitous dalliances with concerns about necessity and reality.

One picture features a rhombus-shaped head on top of a plant-like stem, bulging with veins from a stressful condition, with its face almost ready to pop. Around it are oversized, pink circles, outlined thickly like pizza crusts colored in blue, with no toppings but painterly chops. A floating hot dog sausage waits on the wings. This portrait rests on a colorful mosaic—a child’s puzzle, a crazy quilt, a labyrinth of indeterminate identity. Repetition is predictable behavior applied to build communication: towards the translation of signs into reading experience, a pattern formed from chaos. The residue of an essential act or event leaves a mark that is pleasing both to the eye and the mind, an endless amusement born from contradiction and impossibility, comforting and gay in their aesthetic bop. The abstract pattern of marks and shapes toss and tumble, loop, bend, elongate, rotate, gyrate, and throb with the delightful promiscuity of life, exploring various positions of twined consummation in search of the miraculous happy ending.

Another painting, for instance, has a dark, iconographic cross embracing all four corners. Prickly, purple, floral heads intertwine to make a porous web, and two flowers in the foreground parallel each other as partners, with petal tops exposing their ovaries, which function as a pair of beckoning portals—the eye as the proverbial entry point to the soul, an omniscient peeper exposed to all things. A mock neo-plasticist leg amalgamation boogie-woogies on the picture plane, disrupting the harmonious life of natural appearances while falling back to the comforting reality of conceit within painting.

This evocative picture is a net of seduction, an abstraction of the senses, which is an invisible force making one succumb helplessly without knowing it: to be caught within its crystalline logic of narcissistic fulfillment, overcome by a fatal attraction to the object of one’s desires that is a mirror projection of oneself—all adorned with a constellation of ornamental ideals, glittering prospects, multifaceted veneration: beautiful but deadly.

Certainly, it is a terminal condition: cancerous, to be caught by the amatory, dark beat that spreads from the heart, thumping like voodoo rhythms to flood the mind with commands unusual, out-of-character, out-of-one’s-reason, while also defining such means for living—a drowning sensation without water, an air-tight rationality that suffocates. It is a death instinct that is an inescapable pattern of doom, repeating itself with a hope to resuscitate even a faint echo of life, a camouflage of ecstatic end. What remains after negative fulfillment is a silhouette of semblance: dark, empty, grotesque, layered with previous incarnations of color only to atrophy into the shadow of its former self, such that in the picture, flowers black and grey tilt like in different windmills and wilt towards the ground without any life left—seemingly reaching for their grave, their joy dispirited.

The summer of eroticism gives way to the winter of death, where the fluttering innocence of hope and effusive longing leads to a melancholic expenditure. The desire to consummate is born from the fear of discontinuous existence, with a notion that linking together and procreating to another likeness would enable a continuity of essences. The process, of course, is murderous; a wrenching journey of mutual self-destruction through cycles of affirmation and rejection, joy and pain, futility and hope, all in agreement to preserve life: a union that calls for the dissolution of sovereignty in favor of a homogenous state of constant harmony, order over chaos, albeit with the price of certain death for the individualist. Death is the ultimate nullifier, a transgressive taboo that mocks every facsimile of life—its beauty disregarded, joy removed, leaving only a black stain of its indelible presence.

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