Aleth Ocampo’s legacy of colors
Aleth Ocampo’s art can be regarded as downright pretty! Curating a curtain of boldly veined leaves, “Anihan 2,” seen beside a royally decorated Chinese spoon in “Yellow Dragon 3,” is a challenge to any gallery, but the juxtapositions succeeded at being oddly soothing at cocktail hour!
At cursory sweep, Ocampo’s exhibit has the appeal of a childish romance, with her impasto knife and brushwork. So absorbed is the artist, it seems, in playful renderings of her subjects without serious regard for either symmetry or balance. Splurging colors and almost emotional attention to detail surprise the viewer, as do her backgrounds and choice of point of view. All these can be dismissed as joyful and naïve interpretations of an artist with much to celebrate in life.
Careful reflection though may allow one to sense an unreconciled matter, whereupon hangs a guarded measure of heaviness, well hidden in the potpourri of color. Deliberate or not, a silent desolation is most palpable in the portraits, despite the brilliant primaries. Deceptive is that mood of an overly optimistic brightness to the point of seeming contrived, an almost too-painful effort. The portraits, “Chabeng,” “Ganduz,” “Banuc,” and “Tonio,” all belie the dazzling tints: Ocampo’s subjects’ youthful eyes hiding somber, wiser thoughts.
The “Imari” series can be a study in the artist’s emotional state through the different years it took to be completed. The early ones seem darker in attitude and lesser in detail while the more recent ones are more joyous and intricately embellished. Her energies can overwhelm, most of her subjects overflow their canvases, jarring the viewer’s ordinary expectations with in-your-face treatments. Yet some subjects seem unceremoniously severed in the “Yellow Dragon” series.
While in “Tres Marias,” Ocampo exceeds herself, even as she ignores her margins. Here she opens her mind and heart to an immensity of spirit not quite as evident in the other works.
Aleth Ocampo’s “Handumanon” collection, then, is a visit that necessitates time that one would allocate to reading a diary of a sort, since her art is too much of herself for a fly-by. For as careful and deliberate as she has unveiled her memories, so, too, must one’s attitude be open in viewing it.
“Handumanon” is a bright metaphor of a journey, it seems, where sometimes things are not what they really seem or try to be. Where the tangibles yield the truth of the intangibles, in Ocampo’s exuberant, off-centered, sometimes disproportionate, but very personal art.
That is Aleth Ocampo’s legacy.
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“Handumanon” in on view until Nov. 6, at Art Informal, 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City. Call 725-8518 for details.
