The Mexican painter Octavio Ocampo produces compelling, masterfully composed images that are testament to the idea that a picture’s meaning is constituted at least in part by the observer. Ocampo, who pursued a film and theatre career for some time alongside his art studies, uses the term ‘metamorphic’ to describe his art, which is also often described as surrealist. His evocative optical experiments are impressive, fascinating and somewhat disorientating. As he says: ‘Nothing is quite as it seems’. You look closer at his paintings and suddenly notice the plural realities within them, adding a sort of double-vision to the experience. Today we’ll explore some of Ocampo’s art, touching on the concerns that his paintings share with the works of the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, the philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein and the latin poet Ovid.
