RONALD VENTURA (B.1973)

Ronald Ventura has distinguished himself as an iconic name within contemporary Asian art over the past six years. Since his international debut in 2008, Ventura has emerged strongly as an artist of significant talent; rapidly expanding his visual outreach to create highly distinctive painted, sculptural, and mixed media works. The most critically lauded works by Ventura are those which enact the idea of an individual being subjected to his innermost thoughts, hallucinations, and fantasies; which are potent enough to override his actual reality. Ventura interrogates the concept of what is truly "real" against what is perceived as real by the human mind.

Her Case illustrates Ventura's fascination with the human psyche, with the head as a repository for thought and cogitation. Within this work, Ventura outlines a female cranium, and places the image of the female subject within its confines, suggesting that personal identity - and all its accoutrements of accessories, shoes, clothes, and sense of place and abode - are all a matter of the mind. The brushwork reveals Ventura's painterly skill in depicting almost photorealistic images, while superimposing a meta-image over the underlying subject to create layers of reality and perception.