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Lot Essay
As a work of visual fiction, Zoo Keeper (Lot 2024) by acclaimed Southeast Asian artist Ronald Ventura is composed of many elements: a playground for the human form; a lush adventure within a tropical wonderland; an ambiguous figure caught between elegiac mortality and dystopic impermanence. First exhibited in a critically lauded solo show at the National University of Singapore Museum in parallel with the Singapore Biennale, Zoo Keeper has become firmly established as one of Ventura's most iconic and elegantly crafted images. Ventura is unique in his ability to present completely fresh and dynamic visuals coupled with an artistic flair and purity which sets him far above his peers of this generation.
Within his earliest figurative works, Ventura often articulated a sense of tension or bodily struggle emanating from aggressive physiological renditions of the human form. By 2008 - the year of Zoo Keeper's inspiration - this residual sense of tension had evolved into a psychological dimension; a subtle, yet inexorable affinity for humans caught in existential stasis amidst a fantastical, dystopic environment. Ventura's breed of magical realism involves a highly detailed, photorealistic background invaded by the miraculous and the phantasmagorical. Each visual creation from his brush presents a sense of disjunction and narrative transformation, where "reality" is deceptive and easily displaced by the uncanny twists and turns of the artist's unfiltered imagination. These conflicting binaries have become Ventura's hallmark and a viewer is slowly drawn into navigating uncharted waters as the painted worlds of his making pivot upon their axis.
Zoo Keeper depicts an androgynous figure clad in a fitted dark suit striking a languorous yet distinctively dramatic pose. The entire articulation of the slender form reminds a viewer of a willowy supermodel of Kate Moss calibre - or Dovima, in a black and white photograph by Avedon - whose grace and captivating quality are inborn and intuitive, not from rote training as a racehorse of the runway. The tapering waist, hour-glass proportions and delicate fingers intimate that this figure is undeniably female, yet the final revelation of facial features is kept deliberately obscured and rendered ambiguous by the restraints of the gas mask. Like the Old Masters of art history, Ventura begins each pictorial composition from the classical rigor of the academic human form, before giving free reign to the breadth of artistic creation.
The metaphor of the industrial-quality gas mask is a calculated obfuscating gesture, designed to evoke a sense of anonymity and entrapment. The mask stifles one's personality, restricts speech and hearing, possibly even reduces the individual trapped under its embrace to little more than a sightless automaton. Desensitized through this physical barrier, the girl within is frozen in a panopticon of her own endlessly revolving thoughts, despite her bravura posture. However Ventura does not dwell on the context of captivity, but draws a viewer's attention instead to the desires and fantasies arising in a delicate miasma which envelopes the protagonist figure. It appears as though the gas mask, rather than blocking noxious, life-threatening chemicals, is inversely causing a hallucinatory experience for the wearer. Through this hybrid metamorphosis, we realise that Ventura is preoccupied with the intrinsic texture of being human, rather than its overt physicality - the myriad possibilities of the cogitating mind given shape and form. In other works revolving around this theme such as Apocalyptic Channel (2011), a man asleep conjures up a mirage of images from his television set, which like the gas mask is another engineered median of our technological age. Similarly Zoo Keeper shows a verdant imaginary forest sprouting from the mind of the insensate dreamer - rather like the goddess Athena springing up fully-formed from the head of Zeus. In Ventura's universe, there is life yet from within the padded cell and heaven indeed in a wild flower.
Within this jungle landscape of the artist's psyche, tendrils of large fronded plants and dew-heavy petals curl upward and away from the anatomy of the masked girl. A tiger prowls across one side of her head, while a hare springs from the other. A gazelle gallops down the slope of her shoulder and a lemur nestles in the crook of her arm. From a bent elbow, a spider drops down a laceline of webbing. The entire zoological frieze is rendered in definitive inky lines, precisely drawn in gradient shades of black and grey like a beautifully wrought tattoo, occasionally interspersed with a rosy crimson as though the flowers are alternately blossoming and bleeding. As in many of Ventura's other works, the background spatial setting is architecturally devoid and suffused throughout with hues of warm, marbelled grey as though creating the tableau of a wasteland or a stage set emptied of props. The dissonance between the frenzied foreground and nullified backdrop creates an effect akin to turning a spotlight on to the central figuration and suspending it within a moment's gravity before the curtain finally falls.
Hailing from the Philippines, an archipelago rife with myth and magic particularly during its Spanish and pre-Spanish periods, Ventura is keenly aware of the power of fables, theatre and storytelling. Similar to the Pre-Raphaelites, Ventura's female muses often enact a role of mythological or allegorical heroine but with a contemporary twist imposed upon their visages: a gas mask, a bar code, whimsical cartoons and street graffiti, reminding viewers that Ventura is constantly grappling with the rapid passage of time forward into the twenty-first century even as he delves into the realm of the ageless imagination. Apart from his prolific imagery, what also defines and distinguishes Ventura is his technical virtuosity. Much admired by other artists within his fraternal milieu, even as a student in the University of Santo Tomas Ventura was acknowledged to have a strong painterly technique and a rare method of finishing his works with a smooth, unbroken surface.
Within Zoo Keeper Ventura leaves us with a lingering message; that we are, in truth, the only keepers of our menagerie of thoughts and dreams.
Within his earliest figurative works, Ventura often articulated a sense of tension or bodily struggle emanating from aggressive physiological renditions of the human form. By 2008 - the year of Zoo Keeper's inspiration - this residual sense of tension had evolved into a psychological dimension; a subtle, yet inexorable affinity for humans caught in existential stasis amidst a fantastical, dystopic environment. Ventura's breed of magical realism involves a highly detailed, photorealistic background invaded by the miraculous and the phantasmagorical. Each visual creation from his brush presents a sense of disjunction and narrative transformation, where "reality" is deceptive and easily displaced by the uncanny twists and turns of the artist's unfiltered imagination. These conflicting binaries have become Ventura's hallmark and a viewer is slowly drawn into navigating uncharted waters as the painted worlds of his making pivot upon their axis.
Zoo Keeper depicts an androgynous figure clad in a fitted dark suit striking a languorous yet distinctively dramatic pose. The entire articulation of the slender form reminds a viewer of a willowy supermodel of Kate Moss calibre - or Dovima, in a black and white photograph by Avedon - whose grace and captivating quality are inborn and intuitive, not from rote training as a racehorse of the runway. The tapering waist, hour-glass proportions and delicate fingers intimate that this figure is undeniably female, yet the final revelation of facial features is kept deliberately obscured and rendered ambiguous by the restraints of the gas mask. Like the Old Masters of art history, Ventura begins each pictorial composition from the classical rigor of the academic human form, before giving free reign to the breadth of artistic creation.
The metaphor of the industrial-quality gas mask is a calculated obfuscating gesture, designed to evoke a sense of anonymity and entrapment. The mask stifles one's personality, restricts speech and hearing, possibly even reduces the individual trapped under its embrace to little more than a sightless automaton. Desensitized through this physical barrier, the girl within is frozen in a panopticon of her own endlessly revolving thoughts, despite her bravura posture. However Ventura does not dwell on the context of captivity, but draws a viewer's attention instead to the desires and fantasies arising in a delicate miasma which envelopes the protagonist figure. It appears as though the gas mask, rather than blocking noxious, life-threatening chemicals, is inversely causing a hallucinatory experience for the wearer. Through this hybrid metamorphosis, we realise that Ventura is preoccupied with the intrinsic texture of being human, rather than its overt physicality - the myriad possibilities of the cogitating mind given shape and form. In other works revolving around this theme such as Apocalyptic Channel (2011), a man asleep conjures up a mirage of images from his television set, which like the gas mask is another engineered median of our technological age. Similarly Zoo Keeper shows a verdant imaginary forest sprouting from the mind of the insensate dreamer - rather like the goddess Athena springing up fully-formed from the head of Zeus. In Ventura's universe, there is life yet from within the padded cell and heaven indeed in a wild flower.
Within this jungle landscape of the artist's psyche, tendrils of large fronded plants and dew-heavy petals curl upward and away from the anatomy of the masked girl. A tiger prowls across one side of her head, while a hare springs from the other. A gazelle gallops down the slope of her shoulder and a lemur nestles in the crook of her arm. From a bent elbow, a spider drops down a laceline of webbing. The entire zoological frieze is rendered in definitive inky lines, precisely drawn in gradient shades of black and grey like a beautifully wrought tattoo, occasionally interspersed with a rosy crimson as though the flowers are alternately blossoming and bleeding. As in many of Ventura's other works, the background spatial setting is architecturally devoid and suffused throughout with hues of warm, marbelled grey as though creating the tableau of a wasteland or a stage set emptied of props. The dissonance between the frenzied foreground and nullified backdrop creates an effect akin to turning a spotlight on to the central figuration and suspending it within a moment's gravity before the curtain finally falls.
Hailing from the Philippines, an archipelago rife with myth and magic particularly during its Spanish and pre-Spanish periods, Ventura is keenly aware of the power of fables, theatre and storytelling. Similar to the Pre-Raphaelites, Ventura's female muses often enact a role of mythological or allegorical heroine but with a contemporary twist imposed upon their visages: a gas mask, a bar code, whimsical cartoons and street graffiti, reminding viewers that Ventura is constantly grappling with the rapid passage of time forward into the twenty-first century even as he delves into the realm of the ageless imagination. Apart from his prolific imagery, what also defines and distinguishes Ventura is his technical virtuosity. Much admired by other artists within his fraternal milieu, even as a student in the University of Santo Tomas Ventura was acknowledged to have a strong painterly technique and a rare method of finishing his works with a smooth, unbroken surface.
Within Zoo Keeper Ventura leaves us with a lingering message; that we are, in truth, the only keepers of our menagerie of thoughts and dreams.