ROLDAN MANOK VENTURA

Keen on proposing new ways of looking and discovering aesthetic possibilities from the unlikely sources, Roldan ‘Manok’ Ventura gathers new pieces from his artistic trajectory involving the appropriation of works by Renaissance and Baroque masters—faded, blurred, and reworked only in sections or segments of the original composition. In Transcending Clarity, Manok Ventura stresses going beyond the limits of sharpness and accuracy in reproducing images and invites viewers to defamiliarise their encounter with art history and initiate conversations on current interventions to human perception and visual experience. The collection gathers iconic and notable works mostly from the Renaissance and Baroque masters—whose renowned works communicated revolutionary and novel ways of perception as well as groundbreaking approaches and techniques in artmaking. While the exhibition mainly references the art of the past, it is more than an ode to key moments and personalities of an art-historical timeline. It is as much inspired by present realities, particularly contemporary technologies that mediate in the reproduction, circulation, and presentation of images and other visual information to the viewer. Roldan ‘Manok’ Ventura took up Fine Arts at the University of the East and has been consistently mounting solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally. His paintings take interest in visual formations resulting from processes of deterioration and decay among ordinary objects, sites, and surfaces in the urban setting, and more recently from the sluggish transmission of visual data online.

This show is realised in collaboration with The Working Animals Art Projects (TWA). The exhibition runs from 12 February to 15 March 2020. Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok, Main Space, Room 201-206, River City Bangkok, 23 Soi Charoenkrung 24, Sampanthawong, Bangkok, 10110. Thailand.