May 10–June 28, 2025
Curated by Ruel Caasi
Whitestone Gallery
1F, No.1, Jihu Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei City, 114, Taiwan (R.O.C)
This exhibition is a joyride through Ronald Ventura’s headspace, where hypercars mutate into myth, muscle, and memory. The machines snarl, shimmer and carry flaming lion heads and ghostly hands gripping the wheel. Born out of the boredom and claustrophobia of 2020, Ventura’s mobile sculptures escape the white cube and hit the road with intent. Think carbon fiber dreams, anime anxiety and techno-baroque excess.
This is art unchained from its frame and revving at full throttle, ripping open the everyday to let mythology in. There is pressure, pleasure and everything in between.
Ronald Ventura
‘Pressure & Pleasure’
Curated by Ruel Caasi
Pressure & Pleasure delves into the dualities that define Ventura’s latest body of work. Velocity becomes language as the car transforms into canvas. In a world constantly shifting gears, Ventura explores the friction between restraint and release, among industrial might, emotional intensity and artistic expression. His sculptural interventions and painted surfaces capture the pulse of modern life, compressing myth, memory and media into sleek silhouettes and hyper-detailed chaos. Here, motion is not merely mechanical but metaphorical, becoming an engine for identity, transformation and survival.
This exhibition invites viewers into the poetry of movement, where speed is both seduction and struggle. Whether rendered in carbon fiber or graphite, Ventura’s works reveal a delicate choreography of tension. It is an interplay between the desire to conceal and the impulse to reveal, between both the allure and burden of power. Pressure & Pleasure becomes a meditation on the human condition in an era of acceleration and disruption, inviting us to linger in the liminal space where art, like motion, is never truly still.
Ronald Ventura (b. 1973, Manila, Philippines) studied Fine Arts (major in painting) at the University of Santo Tomas.
A versatile artist, he works across painting, sculpture, and installation art. His intricately layered paintings and multimedia artworks often intertwine historically laden symbols with pop culture signifiers, creating rich imaginative compositions that act as metaphors for the multifaceted national identity of the Philippines.
Early in his career, he received the Artist of the Year prize from Art Manila in 2001, the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in 2003, and the Ateneo Art Awards-Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art in 2005, as well as a Gallery Studio Residency Grant in Sydney.
In 2012, he was a resident artist at Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Major solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the NUS Museum, Singapore (2008); Museo delle Culture, Lugano (2014); Ayala Museum, Manila (2015); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2016). He has also taken part in the Prague Biennale (2009) and Nanjing Biennial (2010). He lives and works in Manila.
