Background, foreground: Ventura and I were schoolmates in a now-defunct school. (I think we both got invited to a reunion of the alumni of our ghost of a school – a really surreal experience. Like getting beaten up by Rene Magritte’s shadow.) I used to hang out in the Ventura house in Tonsuya, Malabon, have dinner, drink Pale Pilsen with the Ventura brothers (Olan and Manok), scour the dead and empty Malabon streets at ungodly hours, eat sopas, drink coffee, and go home to sleep just as the corporate ghosts make their way out of their domestic coffins. All the while we talked art and philosophy. Dali. Magritte. Klimt. Basquiat. Warhol. Danny Dalena. Plato. Jung. Freud. Hiraya Gallery. The Eraserheads. As well as occasionally inane topics like dreaming of being pursued by flying noses.
Ronald rented a house in Tansa, Navotas to make murals for a Mandaluyong school ages ago. I spent weeks there, just hanging out, or playing Cure songs while the Ventura brothers worked on the huge canvases. On the day of the delivery of the murals, we boarded the finished works in a truck, climbed aboard, and made the long trip to the school, nearly getting electrocuted by low-strung electrical wires. I wrote a one-paragraph explanation for each mural: Ugly language for beautiful art. As if images could be conveniently explained away by handy words.
From that time in high school up to these high-strung times, Ronald Ventura’s work never fails to amaze me.
Ventura, who received the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines last year, is mounting his 13th one-man exhibit titled Human Study at the Art Center on the fourth floor of SM Megamall.
In Dead End Images held last year at the Art Center, the artist meditated upon the exploitation of children by presenting marionettes, children’s body parts used for advertising, girls peddling sampaguita garlands ("National Flower"), boys with fragile wings, and bar codes signifying the commodification of children (Noel Chomsky would approve).
This time, the exhibit encompasses the breadth of the artist’s exploration of the human figure. One of the walls of the sprawling venue will be filled with 200-plus drawings (3.5 inches x 5 inches) accumulated over the years. Why this burning preoccupation with the human figure?
"The show is about the study of the human body, but it also deals with human acts and practices. So, you could consider it a study of humanity."
One painting that snagged my attention right away depicted a man wearing a dog mask in a crouching canine position. Its right eye stares menacingly, hyper-realistically. Its skin has the color of powder, purity and chalky-white death. Its angry veins are rivered by bad blood and resentment. Its title is "Insecured."
"This concerns human nature which always has a paranoid side," the artist explains. "Some people control it better than others. Others get controlled by paranoia."
The strange dog-faced man is panting with unease and paranoia. He is appeased only by the possession of a bone. Ventura’s signature colors of powdery white, brown, and rigor mortis green lend a menacingly cadaverous pallor to the painting, an almost monochromatic horror.
Another painting called "Francism" depicts a penitent lovingly clutching a crucifix, modeling the stigmata wounds of St. Francis himself.
The Christian mythos is an important aspect of Ventura’s art attack. He says his religious aesthetics is an attempt to depict images that are nesting in the Jungian collective consciousness. The artist unflinchingly vents his ire on rampant malpractices, blind showcases of faith, deeply ingrained ignorance, as well as the flocks of hypocrites and flagellants who turn the passion of Christ into one quirky circus.
"Isn’t it enough that Christ died for our sins? Must penitents do it too, and make a mockery of His sacrifice?"
Ventura, who has included sculptures for his Human Study exhibit, tells the story of how he went to an artisan who makes saint sculptures. Ventura specified what he wanted to purchase – a sculpture of a child with an adult body. Seems normal enough. Only there’s a catch: Ventura wanted the figure to have wings. The artisan balked at the idea, practically dismissing it as sacrilegious.
"That’s a case of people confusing the image for the real thing," Ventura quips.
"Temptation" deals with the hawking of women over the Internet. The "@" symbol covers the female figure’s crotch. She clutches a biblical apple. A facsimile of an Albrecht Duhrer print textures the background.
Ventura also constructed a resin assemblage with an octagonal base and punctuated it with tiny figures of saints as well as ready-mades of plastic soldiers and animals. He says this is a sort of monument to iconography – like an ironic take on the Tower of Babel. "This is a compilation of ready-mades," he humbly describes.
The centerpiece of the show is a mammoth mural (8 feet x 12 feet) titled "Human Study," which is one of Ventura’s most impressive works so far. With images such as two horses in one body pulling each other in separate directions, a man with plastic wings, a woman in a plastic bubble, a figure reclining on a bed, as well as bottles and fruits arranged as if by "a salesman and not a still life painter."
I ask Ventura where he gleans his inspiration.
"I think it was Basquiat who said that you don’t ask a musician where his music come from. Images are like a deck of cards that convey what emotions an artist is undergoing."
He adds that painting has now been tempered by the buffet of images from cinema, videos, computer graphics, and every day life.
"Nagkalat lang ang images," Ventura concludes. "A painter just gathers them."