Beast Watcher by Ronald Ventura
Feb 15 – March 12, 2023
Ayala Museum OpenSpace

Ayala Museum, in partnership with Ronald Ventura Studio, presents its latest exhibition for OpenSpace, the museum’s public art exhibition program. This presentation, entitled Beast Watcher, features highly acclaimed and record-breaking artist Ronald Ventura, and is also part of the Art Fair Philippines 2023 10 Days of Art.

Beast Watcher includes two new sculptures and an art car which will be displayed outside the front and rear entrances of Ayala Museum. Anito Ape + Zoomanity (Beast Master) is a two-in-one installation of a creature with an ape head and an anito body accompanied by its bull sidekick. They lord over the space fronting Ayala Museum and survey Makati Avenue and The Link car park with a telescope. Hunter? Voyeur? Lurker? Sightseer? Is it a case of the artwork-as-view viewing the viewer? This work is reminiscent of Ventura’s Watching the Watchmen in 2012 where contemporary sculptures inspired by Ifugao rice gods stare at visitors with an air of divine reckoning.

Choosing a palette of caution sign colors (yellow and black), Ventura meditates on NFT culture and social media, how images from the past (anitos, bul-ols) can be combined with their counterparts in the present (Bored Apes, anime, cartoons), creating a third entity. The ape is about to step on a banana peel which foreshadows the figure’s slapstick slip. The folly of slipping into a lurker’s mentality, perhaps?

Another sculpture, Hyper Beast (Rhino), is that of a black rhinoceros with human feet and a yellow horn trudging toward its appointed end. Lastly, a Porsche 911 Cabriolet is transformed into an art car with paintings of a horse rider—juxtaposed with images of lightning, a pedestrian crossing, Richie Rich, and a myriad of other symbols—and continues Ventura’s exploration of art as an agent of motion and not just an object of stasis. The show is a combination of public art gravitas and contemporary art waggishness.

Ronald Ventura (b. 1973) is a Filipino contemporary artist who has had key exhibitions in museums and galleries all over the world. He is famous for his signature style of combining images from Philippine folk art, Asian symbols, pop culture icons, and historical references. Layered in a dizzying tableau or combined in playful, unexpected ways, images in Ventura’s art reflect the multiple facets of Philippine culture and identity.

The exhibition is presented under Ayala Museum’s outdoor exhibition program called OpenSpace, which provides a public space for dialogue and interaction with contemporary art and artists. Previous exhibitors include Toym Imao, Leeroy New, Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan, Plet Bolipata, Lilianna Manahan, Mark Justiniani, Allison Wong David, Alwin Reamillo, and James Clar.

The exhibition is open to the public and runs from February 15 to March 12, 2023 at Ayala Museum.

Ayala Museum members and ticket holders can avail of the discounted Art Fair PH ticket price of Php 350.00 from 17-19 February 2023.

The Menarco Vertical Museum is a carefully curated collection of pieces by notable contemporary Filipino artists. Housed in choice public spaces in and around the Menarco Tower, this unique museum is a testament to what the modern Filipino is capable of. According to Isa Lorenzo of the renowned Silverlens Gallery, art in the workplace has the potential to shape the tedium of our lives, whether you’re a worker in the tower or a visitor who happens to be passing by, the experience will have the transformational effects of art in the human experience.

Feb 15 – 25, 2023
6:00 – 10:00 pm
Green Wall, Tower 2, Ayala Triangle Gardens

“WATER THE SEEDS OF TRUTH WITH YOUR TEARS. ONE DAY THEY WILL BLOOM FLOWERS THAT WILL TOUCH HEAVEN.”
—SN

In Bloom is a digital art installation piece that explores the proliferation and permeation of digitized memory in the post-internet age. Conceptually, the work is a viscerally layered amalgamation of symbolism and visual poetry. Created from remixed source material comprised of various stock images that conflate an assortment of lush floral scenery, the installation transforms a site-specific location into an intimate digital garden. Stylistically rendered in a lo-fi aesthetic, there is a subtle emphasis on painterly compositions that pay homage to classic still life and landscape sensibilities. Although the narrative elements and evocative allusions of each viewing plane serve as intermediary links to a not-so- distant past (framed as a fresh memory of springtime), they poignantly illustrate the internet’s role in shaping our memories and our perception of a carefully edited reality resulting from our predestined assimilation with new media technologies.

Locations where machines are present make an ideal environment to experience the piece, facilitating a direct juxtaposition of the organic properties of nature and manmade technology in which both the viewer’s participation and surroundings are reflected. Thus, an induced nostalgia coloring one’s personal experience becomes a consequentiality, exemplifying the artist’s ability to redefine nostalgia as an almost palpable circumstance that is well preserved in the psychological textures of the work. This digital floral garden attempts to locate the youthful pulse of fleeting memories, fragments culled and pieced together in an age when memory itself has been inevitably digitized.