Tang Contemporary Art is proud to present “Transcending Clarity” a solo show by Roldan “Manok” Ventura, curated by Michela Sena.
Keen on proposing new ways of looking and discovering aesthetic possibilities from the unlikely sources, Roldan “Manok” Ventura gathers new pieces from his artistic trajectory involving the appropriation of works by Renaissance and Baroque masters—faded, blurred, and reworked only in sections or segments of the original composition. In Transcending Clarity, Manok Ventura stresses going beyond the limits of sharpness and accuracy in reproducing images and invites viewers to defamiliarise their encounter with art history and initiate conversations on current interventions to human perception and visual experience. The collection gathers iconic and notable works mostly from the Renaissance and Baroque masters—whose renowned works communicated revolutionary and novel ways of perception as well as groundbreaking approaches and techniques in art-making. While the exhibition mainly references the art of the past, it is more than an ode to key moments and personalities of an art-historical timeline. It is as much inspired by present realities, particularly contemporary technologies that mediate in the reproduction, circulation, and presentation of images and other visual information to the viewer. Roldan “Manok” Ventura took up Fine Arts at the University of the East and has been consistently mounting solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally. His paintings take interest in visual formations resulting from processes of deterioration and decay among ordinary objects, sites, and surfaces in the urban setting, and more recently from the sluggish transmission of visual data online.
This show is realized in collaboration with The Working Animals Art Projects (TWA)
Roldan Manok Ventura
B.1979 in Manila, Philippines
He graduated from the Art Department at Manuel L. Quezon University in 2004
Ventura is fascinated by the physical form of the body, and he is devoted to exploring the structures produced through dynamic interactions between natural and human power. His art has always hovered in a grey area between the spontaneous and the meticulous, the certain and the chance.
Ventura’s work has been well-received in Southeast Asia. To date, he has held nearly twenty solo exhibitions in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Taiwan, including shows at Secret Fresh Art Gallery, the Ayala Museum, BLANC Art, the UE Alumni Cultural Center, Richard Koh Fine Art, and Artisan Space. In 2003, he won Second Prize in the Twentieth Metrobank YPA National Painting Exhibition and, in 2001, he won the Grand Prize at the Third Nokia Art Exhibition.