RONALD VENTURA (PHILIPPINES, B. 1973)
RONALD VENTURA (PHILIPPINES, B. 1973)

Wonderland

Details
RONALD VENTURA (PHILIPPINES, B. 1973)
Wonderland
signed and dated ‘Ventura 2012’ (lower left)
oil on canvas
152.5 x 152.5 cm. (60 x 60 in.)
Painted in 2012
Provenance
Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong

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Annie Lee
Annie Lee

Lot Essay

One of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in Southeast Asian Art, Ronald Ventura is known for his ability to express his thoughts on the chaotic situation of our modern world through his art. Hailing from a background of rich storytelling and mythology within the Philippines, Ventura has rapidly expanded his idiosyncratic visual outreach to create highly recognisable and lucidly spellbinding paintings. Every canvas given life under his brush is a carefully crafted tableau with a unique cast of characters, metaphors and motifs—an elegant dance of the figments within our imagination.

Ventura's artworks feature a distinctive multi-layering of images spanning the breadth of hyperrealism, symbolism and pop culture influences. His unique style and penchant for fusing humans and animals, flesh and machine (as in his other works) within a visual landscape has informed a new way of approaching contemporary culture that has led him to become one of the most sought-after artists in Southeast Asia.

In Wonderland (Lot 222), he draws on the 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll, painting a saccharine pastel-toned background depicting a verdant garden filled with spring flowers, a pond and a soft blue sky above. This dreamy landscape is weighed down with the amalgamation of 'Alice' motifs with monstrous beasts and symbols of death, turning what would be a land of pleasure and marvel into a nightmarish scenario.

Sinister indications are manifest in the monstrous amalgamation of Alice with the lower body of a deer, a ghostly older female duplicate of herself in child-like dress and a hyperrealist deer skull cradled in the arms of the former. Both females are surrounded by a chaotic wood and are besieged by a frightening chimera ravenously devouring a butterfly. Innocence and vulnerability as represented by tropes such as the child, the deer, the woman and the butterfly, are juxtaposed against forces of predatory evil. The artist's stark contrast of black figures intersecting a colourful and picturesque reality also offers a compelling look at the world today, where notions of child-like wonder, beauty and innocence are tainted and decayed by a widespread plague of vice, malice, inequality and injustice that has eroded human existence.

However, Ventura's vision of a subverted fantasy world presents a glimmer of redemption in his depiction of a small female figure in the foreground wielding a sword at the monster. The image, adapted from John Tennial's illustration of the slaying of the heinous Jabberwock in Caroll's poem Jabberwocky, symbolises an act of heroism in conquering evil. It is the antidote to a world pervaded by menace, and like the poem, celebrates the power of bravery in the face of danger.

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