Nature is a dead language

Curiouser and curiouser…

The hyperrealist mashup continues for Ronald Ventura. There may be nothing alchemically new in terms of the paintings and sculptures in “Converging Nature,” the artist’s exhibition of recent works on view at The Drawing Room, and it’s more like a recapitulation of the suites of artworks in recent years (such as the successful show at Tyler Rollins in New York last year titled “Metaphysics of Skin” and “Mapping the Corporeal” in Singapore a couple of years back), which present how reality has become a multi-layered beast and the prevalence of animal mankind, but since this is Ronald Ventura, the Drawing Room works are enthralling. Yes, this is Ronald Ventura, only one on Earth Street and only one on Earth itself. Even if gallery Mephistopheleses are encouraging their young discoveries to plunder his style and technique. That’s the big and small of it.

It’s like going down the black hole to follow Alice’s white rabbit of weirdness.

Take Ronald’s deconstruction of a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose — forget that shit. The artist presents his take on the flower in all its pixilated glory as a way of commenting on how pictures or images rob the flower of its “flowerness.”

“We look at a picture or an image of a flower and automatically think it’s the flower, and not its representation. Thus we have robbed it of its essence. Kaya kapag sinabi nating ‘truth,’ ang dami nang nakapatong na truths.”

Same with reality. We have appropriated nature for ourselves and created some sort of natural Frankenstein, and this we see in Ventura’s work: an amalgam of the natural and the artificial (the supra-natural), of proportion and distortion, of reality and something entirely else. 

Ventura also pursues his exploration of Jungian archetypes, but this time instead of the animus-anima dichotomy, a different entity enters the fray — the “anime.” Such is the philosophy behind the “Animanime” sculpture in fiberglass resin, stainless and polyurethane.

“Outsiders” is composed of five small panels depicting assorted strangeness — a crashed car here, a dead bird there, and grayness everywhere.

The five-paneled painting has an interesting genesis. “Whenever I read magazines or books, I cut out the pages with pictures that somehow made a big impact on me. I made copies of them as paintings, altering them, adding an object here and there. I call the piece ‘Outsiders’ because the meaning of the group of paintings depends upon the outlook of the perceiver, it depends upon the personal assessment of the viewer.”  

“Converging Nature 2” could be a depiction of a future city, or building blocks of the apocalypse, lines intersecting in a mad yet precise flurry. Could be. Ventura amplifies:

“This piece started out as doodles on my sketch pad. It’s all about the construction of a structure, not in the architectural sense where there’s planning and measurement. This is more unplanned, more of an example of automatism.”

So whatever these shapes form in the end is immaterial. It’s the journey of the hand that matters not the destiny of the drawing.

Quite interesting are the “Scaled Man” sculptures. These fiberglass resin, stainless artworks with polyurethane paint have two sides to them: one is the headless body with classical sculpture proportions, second is its appendage of a mechanical implement (a cross-like bar of metal, a compass-like jointed arm).

“When I was traveling across Europe, I had a chance to see Greek and Renaissance sculptures,” Ventura explains. The pieces were already damaged, cracking even, and they had structural reinforcements to keep them from totally crumbling. The artist incorporated this image into his latest sculptural series, the metal implements becoming parts of the sculptures themselves. They also serve another purpose.

Ventura, the auction star that he is, gets miffed whenever collectors hear about his latest piece and automatically ask what size or how much it is.

“It’s all about size and per-square-inch. They don’t see the sculpture itself (in its totality). So might as well put rulers that I bought from National Book Store, found objects. Now can you still call this a sculpture?”

So who’s to say what is or what is not a sculpture?

Most of the paintings are dichotomies of hyperrealist rendering and lowbrow doodles — Da Vinci meets Walt Disney, Dürer by way of Loony Tunes — as well as human figures being assaulted by grids, pixels, perspective lines, blurs, blotches, etc. 

This is the sense that we get from the “Converging Nature” exhibition. To say this in a way without the mumbo-jumbo of art criticism which sometimes seeks to make the complicated even more confounding. Most critics make their article sound like school, and that’s not cool at all. Let Ventura say it succinctly: “Most of these images come from various sources, various inspirations.” Clearly a case of “let’s-bolt-in.”  

As if multiple worlds are transpiring at the same time. That’s how it is on Ronald Ventura’s Earth Street.

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Ronald Ventura’s “Converging Nature” is on view until Dec. 22 at The Drawing Room, 1007 Metropolitan Ave., Metrostar Bldg., Makati City. For information, call 897-7877 or 897-6990, e-mail thedrawingroomgallery@yahoo.com, or visit www.drawingroomgallery.com.