Provenance: Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI)

Exhibited: Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), Ronald Ventura: Recyclables, Singapore, November 17 - December 15, 2012
Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Shadow Forest: Encounters and Explorations, Manila, January 30 - March 14, 2017

Literature: Ventura, Ronald, Adele Tan, and Clarissa Chikiamco. Ronald Ventura: Recyclables (Exhibition Catalog). Singapore: Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), 2012. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the STPI in from November 17 to December 15, 2012. Full-color photograph and painting description on page 26. Paparoni, Demetrio and Ronald Ventura. Ronald Ventura: Works 1998 - 2017. Milan: Skira editore S.p.A., 2018. Full-color illustration and painting description on page 321.

ABOUT THE WORK

F or his 2012 solo exhibit titled Recyclables, Ronald Ventura produces an impressive and diverse selection of works that not only showcases his practice, but his ability to remain novel and cutting-edge despite working with a relatively unfamiliar medium. The exhibit was mounted at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute and featured access to new and experimental media that allowed Ventura to push the boundaries of his craft. Ventura himself notes that “To try new things, to figure out new ways, to do art in a manner that has never crossed my mind, and to end up with something surprisingly fresh and undeniably new in this artistic wonderland at the heart of the Lion City.” The result is a groundbreaking exhibit that tackles not only climate change and the arguably ongoing ecological collapse, but man’s complex relationship with nature and its conceptual underpinnings. In terms of his practice, Dr. Adele Tan notes Recyclables’ importance within Ventura’s canon by noting that: “Here the style that so cleaves to Ventura’s reputation is momentarily put aside (although vestiges of his impeccable skill with drawing remain discernibly present) in favor of a presentation of something less tangible, like the forces sentiment and culture, religious or spiritual imagination, and the antinomies of life itself.” She adds that “The tension raised here is instead that of the primordial opposition of Man and Nature, and also the circumspection of what is human nature and its fate, which he had already begun with his Zoomanities series…” The collection itself can be divided according to medium and style. This particular work at hand belongs to a selection of pieces titled Point of Know Return. The works from this part of the exhibit features lithographs on aluminum lightboxes. The works themselves evoke images or road and caution signs due to their yellow and black motifs as well as their recognizable shapes. But instead of warning us against something external to us, the all-too-familiar images of man-made disasters and hazards. More than a decade after the show, can we say Ventura’s show, and the others like it, have successfully raised awareness regarding our current situation? That depends. But the vagueness of our circumstance may actually lead us down an intriguing, if not righteous, path. Both the enormity and complexity of our current state has led us not only to work on, talking about, and thinking about it in different but also contradictory ways. The philosopher Timothy Morton describes the phenomenon as a hyperobject. Morton himself notes that: “A hyperobject is a name I invented for something that is so vastly distributed in time and space, relative to the observer, that we might not think it’s even an object at all. It’s good to have a word for things that are now only too thinkable, if not totally visible—global warming, radiation, the biosphere… Words enable you to think.” Thus, perhaps our efforts When connected to the understanding of our current ecological predicament as a hyperobject, we can see Ventura’s Recyclables as groundbreaking. Although it does not predate the term, it predates Morton’s own aesthetic analysis by more than half a decade. Recyclables not only present contradictions, but understand that this state is its natural tendency. Instead of finding a singular path through uniformity, it accepts diversity as the first step in truly analyzing our problem. Plurality here is not tantamount to confusion. Instead it is a call to rethink how to approach the future by looking at how we view the present. (Jed Daya)