RONALD VENTURA:
quick turn on hyper highways

Curated by
Ruel Caasi

15 October 2022 - 2023 May
Groundspace and Art Alley

With the roads empty and with plenty of space for him to drive in his cars during the long lockdowns of the pandemic, Ronald Ventura insisted to rethink what art is supposed to be. And he desired for it to bust out of locked rooms for the freedom of the open road. He desired reinvention, to rage against cynicism, and to celebrate the poetry of precision, the elegance of speed.

Inspired by this desire for something new, something dynamic, elegant, untethered, Ventura’s latest exhibit, called Quick Turn on Hyper Highways, speaks to all of these and more through his use of the iconography and materials of high-end hypercars. It is toward this dynamic and fresh new energy that Ventura created the images he has rendered: tigers and horses threaten to leap off the walls, the old masters are summoned and painted over, and ferocious chimeras roam about indoors and out. These beasts are partly human but mostly wild, much like the hypercars to which they are akin – their possibly limitless capacities for danger only held back by the willpower and strength of the humans inside them.

“Art should not be caged in a piece of square or rectangular space, tucked away inside secret rooms,” Ventura asserts. He thus seeks to break free from the boundaries set on where art seemingly should be, hoping to expand its reach into lifestyle itself, and through the very manner in which we live out this world.