Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Random images with a multitude of hues and significations run amok in Ventura’s works, purposely distracting attention from the human bodies as we know them, which he has decidedly rendered as secondary themselves. Ventura’s shift from human bodies to visual noise reflects that of the turn in critical thought in the twenty first century- the seeking of the real within the post-modern hyperrealist world, a frantic retrieval of materiality. The response was the turn from humans to things. The piling of images upon images manifests a venture to re-educate the self in a paradigm shift of art making, whose current face is cultural diversity. For Ventura, this translates to feeding on the ubiquitous cultural icons filtered from various social media channels he is daily subjected to. Ventura’s works are a piling up of images of varying significance, which he renders as a progressive layering, their hierarchy according to the oldest (bottom) to the newest (top) object of attention. The trademark human bodies and iconography remain, but varying nuances show his changing sensibilities as time passes. Ventura pushes the concept of Humanime to the edge through literal unions of the human and the objects into one entity.