Olan Ventura’s Unstilled Life at the Ayala Museum: Movement in Still Life
The artist’s signature on canvas.
Award-winning artist Olan Ventura’s new exhibit titled “Unstilled Life” at the Ayala Museum is a collection of acrylic paintings depicting various tropical fruits like the suha, the dragonfruit, the mangosteen, and the rambutan. Other works in the Unstilled Life collection are images of the onion and the orange. In this new collection of paintings, Olan Ventura veers away from his usual style of hyperrealist portraiture, but retains his style of placing negatives beside its counterpart positive.
Before and Before. Olan Ventura‘s painting of a dragon fruit partially wrapped in plastic.
The artist says that “the paintings reflect and mirror the nature of the subject.” The technique is amazing, and it almost makes one want to reach out and take a bite of the produce.
It’s realism in its finest sense.
Venutra paints a mangosteen and alternates snippets of the positive image with the negative.
Ventura has taken still life painting to a new level by intermingling the positives with the negatives, hence the title of the Unstilled Life collection. The presentation of the images make the eyes dance.
The paintings look like they’re in motion, and it’s a wonderful representation of the realities of everyday life. We’re always busy, always on the go, and the paintings seem to tell the viewer exactly this.
Olan Ventura graduated from the University of the East in 1998 with a degree in Fine Arts. He is known for the juxtaposition of two images—the positive and the negative—and hyperrealist mirror portraits.
Unstilled Life was on exhibit at Artist Space in The Ayala Museum last December 3, 2014. The museum proper is open from 9:00 AM until 6:00 PM.
Read more about the Ayala Museum here: National Museums of the Philippines: Ayala Museum
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