{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":50178,"auction_id":99,"set_id":131,"lot_number":"87","artist":"Ronald Ventura (b. 1973)","title":"Blind Mechanism","starting_price":20000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2003 (lower left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"84\" x 120\" (213 cm x 305 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":"Ventura, Ronald, Primo Giovanni Marella, Adjani Arumpac, Alice G. Guillermo, Daniela Palazzoli, Igan D'Bayan, and Ramon E.S. Lerma. Realities: Ronald Ventura. Bologna, Italy: Damiani editore, 2011. Full-color illustration and photo caption on page 80","write_up":"2023 will mark the 20th anniversary of the 2003 Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award, in which the lauded contemporary artist Ronald Ventura became one of its recipients. On the eve of that exultant occasion for Ventura, Leon Gallery is delighted to present a monumental piece by the artist he made during that same triumphant period—the year that signaled and gave credence to the emergence of Ventura as a creative force to be reckoned with, not just in the Philippine art landscape but more so in the formidable international arena.
Titled Blind Mechanism, this piece is the largest work by Ventura to come to the Philippine market. The work at hand epitomizes what artist-writer and member of the judges’ panel of the 2003 CCP 13 Artists Award, Sid Gomez Hildawa writes as follows: “Critical stance and rebellious sensibilities are what imparts energy to contemporary art, challenging audiences to explore creative possibilities that lie beyond the comfortable world of the conventional.” The piece is also emblematic of Ventura’s worksduring the 2000s, in which he employs a sepia/red oxide-dominated palette. In the July/August 2002 issue of the Asian Art News, Alice Guillermo writes in her essay ‘Discovering Male Nudes: Ronald Ventura’: “The sepia tonalities evoke memory and the passage of time, but in the intimate personal experience of the artist, they also suggest the color of rusting metal exposed to the elements, an allusion to the artist’s growing up in the depressed areas of Navotas with the corroded, galvanized iron roofing of the shanties.”
The 2003 13 Artists Award catalog writes in its profile of Ventura: “Ventura is dragging old master techniques into 21st-century relevance. He is among a handful of painters who still painstakingly overlay multiple glazes and velaturas, resulting in stunning interplays between transparent and opaque passages. At first approach, his obsession is the male nude, rendered with chromatic restraint, in grisaille, usually on a red-oxide background. But he renders his subjects with such a tour-de-force of technique, that the audience inevitably realizes that his true obsession is painting itself. His is painting that defies digitization and photography, and which co-opts both of them. His is painting pleading for its life.”
In this massive work, Ventura invites the viewer to focus on the imposing figure of a horse, which serves as the central subject. The artist depicts the animal as mounted on rockers, evoking that popular and classic children’s toy—the rocking horse—which a child can ride while playfully moving backward and forward. Ventura imbibes a disturbing atmosphere by depicting the horse as crying tears of blood, explicitly expounding on the subject of animal exploitation. Guillermo, also a member of the judges’ panel for the 2003 CCP 13 Artists Award, writes in the book Realities: Ronald Ventura: “Ventura carries his thematics further by taking a stand against speciesism, which is the belief that the human race is superior to other species and that exploitation of animals for the advantage of humans is justified.”
Adjani Arumpac describes in Realities: Ronald Ventura that the artist’s “animals are those that have been reduced and isolated to “productive and consuming units,” a phrase she borrows from John Berger’s essay ‘Vanishing Animals.’ Furthermore, Arumpac notes that in Ventura’s “narrative, both humans and animals are under observation, exposed to the system’s exploitative gaze.”
Ventura juxtaposes the image of the horse with images of machine engines and circus clowns. In doing so, Ventura presents a compelling critique of how greed has pervaded humanity’s psyche. The figures of circus clowns and the depiction of the horse as a toy symbolize human exploitation of animals for mercenary amusement. The machine engines represent how animals have been treated as “mechanical devices” conditioned for continuous abuse and exploitation until they ultimately deteriorate, to which they can be easily replaced. Ventura does not aim his critique toward the consumption of animals by humans for daily sustenance. Instead, he focuses on how humans have been blinded and succumbed to exploitative entertainment, all in the name of profit. The modern circus, represented by circus clowns, is a powerful representation of how the status quo has weighed so much on profit-driven enterprises regardless of the burden of maltreatment it imposes. The circus clowns can also allude to the irony of existence under a capitalist system, in which the primary motive is to accumulate wealth greedily.
Through this work, Ventura effectively raises timely discourses on how ethical treatment and consumption under a system that survives by means of exploitation, whether of humans or animals, is virtually non-existent. Ventura ponders on the burning question of how humans have become more bestial than the other life forms they have deemed inferior. (A.M.)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Ronald Ventura (b. 1973) Blind Mechanism signed and dated 2003 (lower left) oil on canvas 84\" x 120\" (213 cm x 305 cm)