Ronald Ventura is a leading figure in South-East Asian contemporary art. His intricately layered paintings and multimedia artworks intertwine historically laden symbols with pop culture signifiers, creating richly imaginative compositions that act as a metaphor for the multifaceted national identity of the Philippines.
Read MoreBorn in Manila, in 1973, the artist graduated with a BFA from the University of Santo Tomas, Manila. Ventura developed his idiosyncratic style by combining high and low artforms that index the occupying powers of Spain, Japan and the United States, alongside indigenous Filipino folklore. Hyperreal figures are often enmeshed in a matrix of erratic forces. References to Old Master paintings are superimposed with symbols of American pop culture; Japanese woodblocks are spliced with bestiaries, religious iconography, graffiti and tattoo culture. Such diverse influences are both revelatory and uneasy testament to the ruptured identity of the post-colonial Philippines.
For instance, Second skin (2009) shows a male figure, his head wrapped in cloth. Ventura has layered a cartoon skull over the top, ‘tattooing’ his subject with a ‘second skin’. Through this process of physical and metaphorical layering, Ventura points to the accumulation of meaning over time, yet slyly suggests that its value may also be arbitrary, a costume to be discarded.
Ronald Ventura honed his technique by using Photoshop to orchestrate large canvases where elements of consumer culture, violence and death, increasingly emerged. In The in between nest (2013), for example, a menagerie of birds attack one another in a barren landscape; and a smiling, gun-toting Mickey Mouse floats in the foreground. Behind him, a masked figure looks skyward, while a childlike figure peeks out from a dense snare of hair-like branches. These unsettling images may point to the social decay of urban life or the pervasive violence of everyday imagery. Yet Ronald Ventura is hesitant to give meaning to his artworks. ‘I don’t dare define my works. Most of the time, I just set everything up to make things flow.'
Ronald Ventura received several awards in his early career, including the 2001 Artist of the Year prize from Art Manila. In 2005 he was awarded the Ateneo Art Award which granted him a residency in Sydney, Australia. The award was a career breakthrough for the artist and was followed by a number of international exhibitions. The global exposure left him more critical of the social and environmental degradation in his hometown of Malabon, in Metropolitan Manila.
Amy Weng | Ocula | 2020
