Ronald Ventura

The painting is in good condition, as is the canvas, which is clear and taut. Minor indications of wear and handling around the edges, corners and margins are evident but are unobtrusive. The paint layers are well-preserved and are in stable condition. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals no indication of retouching. Unframed, on stretcher.
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Battle Field shows just what its title implies--Naruto and Sasuke fight it out to death while a host of other icons clump on and around the head with a gas mask in complete colorful chaos. The eye peering out the gas mask is accusing, its aggression palpable.

Ronald Ventura's fascination with the human and the ensuing layering of colors and jarring drawings over it is a theme repeated in relentless regularity. A peek into the process of creating these works explains the oft-created pandemonium. The artist simultaneously puts up all the canvasses inside his studio, randomly working on these according to his inspiration, doodling on one while pondering on the other, leaving another to finish a drawing on yet another one.

The products are whimsical mindmaps that show a flair for compartmentalization.  The artist's attention is long enough to detail the first monochromatic layer with the human subject, and yet also studiedly limited when he finally reaches that stage of putting on other layers--flitting from one canvas to another--to carefully create chaos. 

The results are images that are visually rich and varied but rigidly uniform in concept, which underlines the overarching idea of this artist's works. The human stands still as the modern milieu bombards him with the new, the promised, and the wanted.

This battle has already been lost. The aggression in the human's eye reveals chaos internalized. For the first time, Ventura creates a human that is not pensive/passive. He is ready to brawl his way out of the pop pastiche grave the artist informed/buried him in, straight out of the canvass to the world of the discerning viewer. This is his rite of passage, fueled by a brutal desire to own this new sense of identity The gas mask literally connotes a masquerade. He does not need it. He himself now bears a contagion most virulent.

- Adjani Arumpac