Take the work “Mang Juan,” for example,
where he cleverly transposed Hollywood Hills in
Los Angeles in his wild imagining as being a place
of the entertainment capital, which he visited last
year in the course of his visit to California. Here,
we see in the center the image of Juan Luna with
brush and palette in hand, as if gazing from the
hills to the viewer. Curiously, Veneracion added
the image of a goat, which he claims is a fixture
in his new home in the Antipolo hills, both the
artist and the beast as itinerant characters plucked
from his personal history.
In the other piece “Vincent,” we see
the famous face of Van Gogh, amid a sea of wildly
scrawling patches of line and color. It is presumably
his own tribute to a master whom he deeply admires
and whose own madness must have been the primal
source of his legendary genius.
The reclining nude – that
of the female, of course – is another recurring
image of the artists in his show. In “Logical
Conclusion,” this image is the only clearly
figurative as all else is clearly abstract in form
and spirit. It signifies the one muse that artists
ultimately seek and desperately desire, an image
that must be rendered in a representational manner,
perhaps the logical end he refers to the title.
Veneracion’s other works become more uncompromisingly
abstract in “None Entirely Definable”
and “Issue of Black and White Internalized,”
as well as in “Summer Solstice 2.” In
the first, a diptych of sorts, he simply mesmerizes
the viewer with his palette, the overlapping hues
that evoke a peculiar mood. In the latter, he show
us what dreams can be like in a totally seductive
interplay of media, colors and imagery.
Veneracion has, in his show, embarked on a voyage
through time and space that has made him reexamine
his artistic roots, indeed the artist’s own
way of exorcising the demons of art and artmaking
that have continued to haunt him.
