ABOUT THE WORK

In a 2011 interview, acclaimed contemporary artist Ronald Ventura said that, beyond the fact that he graduated in a fine arts college known for producing artists who are skilled in rendering the human form, human anatomy has fascinated him since he was a child. Ventura also has a fondness for drawing since his early artist days; he would painstakingly render the human body through various execution processes. In describing the artist’s distinct aesthetic of the nude, critic Alice Guillermo wrote that it “is engaged in breaking down the rigid binaries of male-female, even as black-white components of ‘yang’ and ‘yin’ hold within them the kernel of their opposite.” Produced out of artistic expression and attention to visualization of forms with a degree of realism, this early nude work reveals Ventura’s mastery of the human anatomy and its expressive possibilities. Evocative are the details of his figure, from the expressiveness of his subject—explicit or not, highly open for contextual interpretation—to its physique and pose. This piece also came in before the more stylized hyperrealist nude works that comprise his widely celebrated oeuvre marked by anatomical precision and emotive quality as well as a play of light and shadow.