Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

ABOUT THE WORK

Ronald Ventura’s depictions of cyborgs (manmachines) exude an aura of susceptibility. In Tim Armstrong's article The Electrification of the Body, cyborgs “are new kinds of bodies marked by a refiguring of human potential and an increasingly abstract awareness of the body as network and system.” These cyborgs are the result of situations unique to postmodern living. Judith Halbersten and Ira Livingston, the editors of Posthuman Bodies, wrote: “Posthuman monstrosity and its bodily forms are recognizable because they occupy the overlap between the now and the then. Posthuman bodies are of the past and future lived as present crises." Play Pop is Ventura’s appropriation of Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies (1517). The most intriguing cyborgs of Ventura are those of children, as exemplified by this piece. The child’s transformation is threatening, raising questions concerning his survival in a world that is rapidly becoming mechanized. In Ventura’s art, the cyborg form is an assault on our individuality and identity. He also traverses into the commodification of the human being, as shown in the woman's face seemingly taken from a scene in a Japanese anime. Ventura synthesizes commodification and the posthuman into a critique of contemporary issues brought by state and economic apparatus. According to Ventura, “the world is turning into something similar; we can no longer distinguish between what’s real or not. They are totally mixed. We see everything simultaneously. The 'glitch' has been normalized.”