RONALD VENTURA

Ventura previously mounted a large-scale exhibit at Karuizawa New Art Museum in 2021 billed as ‘An Introspective.’ For the artist, it is essential to reconsider and reconstruct his creations, regarding them as part of an ongoing process. There is no such thing as ‘past works,’ since everything is part of a visual journey, a ceaseless undertaking. Compositions are constantly re-contextualised and treated like the ever-changing self or living things shedding their previous ‘skin’ to adapt to new environments. What the artist has explored in series such as ‘Zoomanities’ and ‘Humanime’ — animal-human hybrids entangled in geometric cocoons, as well as a cavalcade of boats, birds of prey, fiestas, medical records and clipboards, traffic signs and quarantine colours signifying restrictions amid pandemics — are revisited every now and then to be put under a new and stranger light.

For his latest show in Whitestone, Ventura continues his fascination with hyper-cars as both a subject and medium for his art, reimagining them as machines with second layers of skin, making use of the form, precision and swagger of brands such as Porsche and turning them into metaphors for mobility, freedom and hyper-imagination in a world that is becoming more and more restrictive. The act of taking cars out of their usual environs and placing them indoors is considered by Ventura as a wild way of blurring distinctions between the outside and interior worlds — roadblocks be damned.

The artist utilises carbon fibre — materials used in making cars — as a sort of canvas for his artworks to emphasise how art is not just something to be mounted in one’s parlour and confined to walls, but something that promises the unfettered, untethered, and unrestrained. In rendering speed and sculpting motion, Ronald Ventura is taking his art to strange new places.