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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF ARCHITECT AND MRS. EMMANUEL "MANNY" A. MIÑANA Airhome signed and dated 2016 (lower right) oil on canvas 84" x 60" (213 cm x 152 cm) PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist EXHIBITED Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Project: Finding Home-Ronald Ventura Solo Exhibition, Taipei, Taiwan, September 15 - November 20, 2016 LITERATURE Paparoni, Demetrio. Ronald Ventura: Works 1998 - 2017. Milan: Skira editore S.p.A., 2018. Full-color photograph on page 177 and painting description on page 174. WRITE UP: Contemporary artist Ronald Ventura ranks among the leading figures of Southeast Asian art. Whitestone Gallery in Tokyo writes: “Ventura's work features a complex layering of images and styles, ranging from hyperrealism, cartoons and graffiti. He views this layering process as a metaphor for the multifaceted national identity of the Philippines.” Ventura has received impressive accolades for his work since the late 1990s, including the 2001 Artist of the Year prize from Art Manilla and the 2005 Ateneo Art Gallery Studio Residency Grant in Sydney, Australia. His first American solo exhibition, Metaphysics of Skin at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2009, garnered critical praise, as did Project: Finding Home at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei in 2016. One outstanding piece at Ventura’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) exhibition in Taipei in 2016 was AIRHOME. This oil on canvas was painted in 2016 as Ventura’s homage to the Philippine nation’s ubiquitous Overseas Filipino Worker or OFW. This strikingly complex and multi-layered painting focuses on the concept of national identity and the arrival of the OFW as modern-day national hero. Elegant and muted tones of taupes, browns and grays celebrate the sophisticated ascent symbolized in the painting’s central figure: the Filipino construction professional and worker. He is taking flight as he travels to various construction sites around the world: the Middle East, the Americas, Europe, Asia. In AIRHOME, he has left his native land and has replaced his home with a new, peripatetic existence. He is walking forward, as if out of the canvas, towards a prosperous future. This gentrification is symbolized by the figure’s suit, dress shoes and self-assured stance, alighting in center stage at the intersection of an intricate two-point perspective composition. His expertise, skilled labor and sacrifice have brought honor to his family and country. A soaring jet further illustrates the drive and dynamic flight of this modern-day Filipino, a source of national pride. Nowhere else in Ventura’s body of work has there been such an artistic chronicling of the rise of the OFW. This important work, AIRHOME, embodies Ventura’s statement on the socio-economic success of his country’s OFWs in the last number of decades. (Architect Emmanuel A. Miñana)