Whitestone Gallery unveils the artistry of Miwa Komatsu and Ronald Ventura

The newly launched Whitestone Gallery in Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark is immediately striking in its polished concrete floors, bare white walls, raw ceilings and sculptural lobby designed by renowned architect Kengo Kuma.

The inaugural exhibition features works by Japanese artist Miwa Komatsu and Filipino Ronald Ventura, whose dynamic paintings and sculptures collide the graphic saturation of Pop with the machinic violence of twenty-first-century Futurism.

“We take in so much information every day, the question is how we digest all of that, how we edit it,” says Ventura, who presents with a remarkably chill and even placid demeanour (complete with a minimalist wardrobe of whites and stone) that is shockingly incongruous with his vivid and frenzied artworks.

“In the Philippines, we have a lot of history, a lot of cultures and layers. Sometimes I celebrate that; sometimes I have – different interactions with that,” he says. “I like to create a bridge to the past, and maybe it creates conflict or drama, but it’s a dialogue with the past.”

His eclectic style incorporates the fantastical minutiae of a Surrealist, comic-book figurations and disembodied Disney gloves, abstract slashes of colour, industrial motifs and blood-like spatters, often set within intricate, sculptural frames composed of ghoulish skull-shaped formations.

“Sometimes the paintings take five or even seven years to create, and I’ll edit and make additions over time, and it changes along the way,” says Ventura. “When I start, I have a certain vocabulary, but when I take it out of storage after a year, it’s like I’m reviewing my old self, and I’ll add something of how I feel now, the colours I’m using now. And it creates a history of yourself, as well as a history of the world.”

If Ventura himself lives the violence or vibrancy of his art – if the years that go into its creation chart an evolution of his emotional states – it is entirely, remarkably unapparent in his conversation. On the progressive obsessions with flashy yellows, orange or blue, he simply says: “I can be inspired by sneakers, by fashion. The colours take over my thinking for a period of time.”

And then on the unsettling turbulence and often ghoulish tropes of mortality, he ventures: “I guess it’s a Filipino thing – to smile in the face of apocalyptic times.”

Ronald Ventura’s ‘An Introspective’ is on display until 28 January 2024.

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