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By Dan Leone

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MANUEL OCAMPO IS still best known for the paintings he made in the early 1990s: controversial images of swastikas, crosses, and other highly charged religious and cultural icons. If that's the Ocampo you know best, then this gallery show – his first in the Bay Area since 1994 – will defy your expectations. It features his newest paintings and mixed-media works, and it shows him moving in a totally different, kitschy, cartoonish direction. With a decade in the spotlight under his belt, he seems to have a new agenda: railing against the art establishment. His primary targets are critics and scholars and all of their complicated jargon and highfalutin theories. Most of Ocampo's new stuff looks like he slapped it together in a hurry, and the job he did of hanging everything makes the gallery look manic and cluttered with too many canvases. His paintings have titles such as Comprehensible Only to a Few Initiates and Making Meaning out of Nothing, poking fun at critics and their ivory tower. It seems that Ocampo is trying to undermine critics' attempts to dissect his work by deliberately making it mean as little as possible, as in his canvas that contains nothing but the words: "A Painting Making a Blank Statement Leaving Nothing to Be Explained." For an artist of his stature, of course, there's no avoiding the critics, but Ocampo is practically belligerent in his warning against reading too much into what he's doing these days. Old fans might be disappointed in his new work, or else they'll love it for what it is on its own terms. Visit the downstairs gallery to check out the Babilonia Wilner collection of Ocampo's paintings dating from 1987 through 2000. Wed.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m., 1808 Fifth St., Berk. (510) 549-1808. (Lindsey Westbrook)