Faces to Watch in ’92 : These are the people Calendar’s critics and writers think you’ll be hearing about in 1992. In some cases, they’re familiar people who will experience a transitional year. Some are newcomers who could have a breakthrough year. : MANUEL OCAMPO

Manuel Ocampo makes pungent, aggressive paintings in which the typically debased genre of Spanish Colonial art serves as platform for a withering exposition of the false claims made for cultural purity. Born in the Philippines and resident in Los Angeles since 1987, the 26-year-old painter draws on history, myth and personal experience in fabricating his often starkly operatic images. Scarcely a year has passed since Ocampo’s first, substantive solo exhibition. On the strength of that provocative show, however, his work was chosen for inclusion in a much-anticipated--and potentially controversial--exhibition set to open later this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” Ocampo’s work will be installed alongside that of some of the region’s most important and widely acknowledged mid-career and younger artists, including Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman and a dozen others.