Your face is beaming

MANILA, Philippines - Scene one.

Think of it as a lost episode of Lost: Artist Olan Ventura drops his cellular phone, something cracks and then something unfathomable happens. Like, say, all his photos become inverted and turn into their polar negatives, transforming skin into blue and eyes into ghostly whites.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe…

Olan has a minor injury, has himself X-rayed, and  while waiting inside the purgatorial clinic, and while on the lookout for the tubercular, Skeletor-like doctor inside his office  has an epiphany of sorts while gazing at the lighted X-ray plate.

Or.

Olan is inside a dark room bathed in red apocalyptic light, listening to the backward chant in Tomorrow Never Knows, and suddenly a thought, a word, comes to him: “reversal.” That’s it… reversal.

But the origins of the artist’s positive-negative paintings are a bit more mundane.

In his latest show at Taksu Singapore titled “Face the Strange,” Olan Ventura presents 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 (“Rental Space [2003],” “Family Portrait [2004]”). The clowns have put down their revolvers (“Plastic Realism” [2005], “Pinoy’s Idol [2005]”). 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. Literally.

The positive image has been reversed into its negative, the “normal” into the subnormal, and the iconic has been turned into the eerie, the uncanny, and where the colors are astoundingly authentic in their artificiality. Everything, in a manner of speaking, has been turned on its head. Salvador Dali, Chuck Close and Jackson Pollock, whose oeuvres centered on subversion, have become models for Olan, who “subverts the subverters” in turn. Michael Jackson and Madonna, two pop culture icons, have been rendered ghostly  as if the outlines of their faces are blurring into degrees (just like the strains of their last hit singles).

The strategy of Olan Ventura is to undermine portraiture in order to keep it alive yet unwell. And these are his new tools: a computer, a camera, a set of painting materials, and an inverse way of looking at the world. Just press Command + “i”.

So at Taksu, we will see Steve Jobs. We will see Lady Gaga. We will see the Mona Lisa. We will see Imelda Marcos. (If we’re lucky enough, we might even see ourselves.) We will see them rendered in straight portraits, lit positively. But we will 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, Chuck Close and Yue Minjun, 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 that poker face of a genre called portraiture, there is still a new way of seeing old forms, or new methods in presenting old ways  or of maintaining a bad romance with good old reinvention.

Oh well, whatever, never mind. So said Kurt. And what did David Bowie say?

Ah, turn and face the strange…

* * *

(NOTE: This article  in two slightly varying incarnations  appeared in the brochures of Olan Ventura’s exhibits at West Gallery in Quezon City and at Taksu Singapore.)

For information, visit http://taksu.com.