Olan Ventura goes beyond the pale

MANILA, Philippines - If it happened otherwise, it would be like a lost episode of Lost.

What if artist Olan Ventura dropped his cellular phone and something cracked and then something unfathomable happened. Like, say, all his photos became inverted and turned into their polar negatives, transforming skin into blue and eyes into ghostly whites. What if Olan had a minor injury, had himself X-rayed, and — while waiting inside the purgatorial clinic, while waiting for the tubercular, Skeletor-like doctor inside his office — had an epiphany of sorts while gazing at the lighted X-ray plate. What if he were inside a dark room bathed in red apocalyptic light, listening to the backward chant in Tomorrow Never Knows, and suddenly a thought, a word, came to him: “Reversal.” That’s it… reversal.

But none of these things ever happened.

Olan Ventura’s latest suite of paintings is a continuation of a long artistic process that, although not as enthralling as the aforementioned vignettes, is as interesting and as enriching to hear for followers of Olan’s art. The domestic pawns have been left behind. The clowns have put down their revolvers. The ice cream and cakes are melting in the dark, all the sweet, bloody, fucking icing flowing down. Mister and Miss Mickey have grown up as cows. Now all that Olan has for his viewers are faces — all the long miles of them.

It gets heady from hereon.

But his technique didn’t spring from the voids of lost islands or lost souls. I swear these are my words describing Ventura’s show of yore:

“(Olan’s) paintings come across as panels filled with bluish and grayish figures, but when seen through an infrared camera the figures have fleshy tones. Ventura’s inverse aesthetics is his way of questioning traditional coloration in art, as well as meditating on how technology has affected the way we see figures and objects.”

For Olan Ventura’s latest show titled “Black Light, White Shadow” at The Ayala Museum ArtistSpace, which opens on Nov. 19, we see Jesus. We see Marilyn Monroe. We see Pablo Picasso. We see an anonymous boy with a deformed jaw. We see them rendered in straight portraits, lit positively. But we also see them under Ventura’s “negative light,” a phrase that should be haloed with a copyright or patent sign somewhere.

During our epic drinking sessions at bars where God does not have a CCTV camera hidden somewhere and where there is virtually a new “Apple” every month (literally, figuratively), Olan has remained inscrutable about his artistic strategies. He merely shrugs everything off as the natural progression of his grappling with graphite, acrylics and oils. His countless hours in the claustrophobic Caloocan building where he has set up his studio. He belittles the art historic dimensions of his latest oeuvres.

Portraiture has come a long way, but it always gets to a point where there is nowhere else to go. Until someone comes along and points the way. Rembrandt, Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, and Chuck Close, the guys before them and the guys later on showed not a few magical detours. The practice seems to overcome whatever snag it gets into. For Olan, he chose to dig elsewhere: not just beneath the skin, or under the surface, but with technology behind him. Very crucial. Since technology has become our contemporary crutch, helps us think, hear and see. We are like Tommy in The Who musical, and guided by gadgets we heed the electronic bleeps to Go to the Mirror!

And this is what the artist sees in the black mirror.

Skin takes on a lively dead color. Hair shimmers with an eerie blue. The colors are unnatural yet very real. The composition is literally in-your-face. It’s as if Olan Ventura is telling all of us there is still so much to plunder with portraiture, there is still a new way of seeing old forms, or new methods in presenting old ways.

Whatever.

"After Image"

Just look at the paintings.

Look again.

And turn and face the strange.  

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Olan Ventura’s “Black Light, White Shadow” is on view from Nov. 19 to Dec. 4 at the ArtistSpace, second floor of The Ayala Museum, Greenbelt Park, on the corner of Makati Ave. and De la Rosa St., Makati City. For information, call 757-7117 to 21.