`GOD IS MY COPILOT' A HIGH-FLYING REVELATION.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

``Manuel Ocampo: God Is My Copilot'' sure leaves you wanting to know more about the Philippine-born, formerly L.A.-based artist. One of the most distinctive stylists to come out of the city's multicultural art scene, Ocampo has produced confrontational paintings that expertly mix traditional religious iconography with ghastly images of hatred, oppression and degradation.

A little in-depth examination of all that rich symbolism would have been nice, but director Phillip Rodriguez takes a different approach. In what becomes a conscious parody of art-world babble, he gets a number of dealers, critics and collectors (including actor Dennis Hopper) to make only the most superficial observations about supercharged, complex work.

Ocampo is expressing his people's colonized displacement, one says. He hates the commercial crudity of the gallery business, another proposes. Those swastikas are a comment upon, not an endorsement of, anti-Semitism, a third assures us.

Ocampo himself is something of a walking self-satire, decked out in backward beret and goatee. He mutters about his paintings being a way of creating dialogue but can't articulate what the discussion should be about. Even funnier, he expresses impatience with being categorized as an ethnic artist while actively exploiting the identity art movement for all its worth.

Refreshingly, Ocampo admits that he's very much in it for the money - refreshing because it's not just a cynical stance, as his work's distinctiveness and terrible beauty hardly seems to have been compromised by success. You get the same, upfront feeling when his wife/manager confesses that she gets embarrassed when her mother comes over and sees some of the freakier pictures, and when Ocampo's own, well-spoken mom cheerfully punctures his rebel artist stance.

Now in his early 30s and living in Spain, Ocampo is moving toward cartoony sketching - a development his collectors find more upsetting than his depictions of rampaging skeletons and rat orgies.

Are they clueless? Is he? ``God Is My Copilot'' isn't deep enough to know. But it's smart enough to smirk when the situation calls for it.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Manuel Ocampo: God Is My Copilot'' (not rated; language, nudity).

The stars: Manuel Ocampo.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Phillip Rodriguez. Produced by Tom Patchett.

Running time: One hour, one minute.

Playing: United Artists, Woodland Hills; Monica, Santa Monica; Grande, downtown Los Angeles.

Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo: ``Manuel Ocampo: God Is My Copilot'' takes a different approach to the Philippine-born, formerly L.A.-based artist, and becomes a conscious parody of art world babble.