One of the most highly acclaimed contemporary artists from the Philippines, Ronald Ventura has garnered enormous international attention in recent years. He is noted for paintings featuring complex layering, combining images and styles raging from hyperrealism to cartoons and graffiti — as well as for a significant body of sculptural work.
He takes the layering process as a metaphor for the multifaceted national identity of the Philippines. Over the centuries, the profound influences of various occupying powers – Spain, Japan, and the United States – along with the underlying indigenous culture, have produced a complex and at times uneasy sense of identity. Ventura explores this historical and psychic phenomenon through a dialogue of images evoking East and West, high and low, old and young – seen, for example, in allusions to Old Master paintings or Japanese and American cartoons. He draws our attention to the “second skin” of cultural signifiers that each person carries with him, however unwittingly. Ventura views skin as an expressive surface – written on with tattoos, concealed under layers of imagery, or exploding outwards to reveal an inner world of fantasy and conflict.
Ventura now ranks among the leading artists of his generation in Southeast Asia. He presented his first US solo exhibition, Metaphysics of Skin, at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in September and October 2009. His much-anticipated second solo show with the gallery will take place in September and October 2011.
See more Work by Ronald Ventura HERE
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