Viewing the latest collection of paintings by Roy
Veneracion, one is awed by images that are ostensibly
unconventional, seemingly inchoate, puzzling to
the mind and eye. Very well, I confess that the
aforementioned epithets may also apply to Veneracion’s
art, abstraction in the post-modern sense, workings
of the hyperactive mind being suddenly stilled,
indeed stalled, by an afterthought, a Freudian slip,
or simply, the thought process seemingly gone astray.
Here is an artist who is thinking and painting with
the spontaneous sparks of the subconscious, culling
images through the mind’s eye in a largely
deconstructive mode. With the provocative title,
“Painting the Subconscious,”
the show of 15 predominantly acrylic
and enamel canvases attempts to record both the
visual and visceral responses to a variety of creative
stimuli engendered by pop music, New Age religion,
Zen Buddhism, current affairs engulfing once peaceful
places on earth, and, as with any abstractionist
worth his brush and palette, the sheer seductive
interplay of form and color.
Veneracion has time and again parlayed images that,
like a seismograph, record his wandering into the
subconscious realm. In a previous show held last
month at the newly-opened mag:net, he initially
explored his fascination with dreams and intuition,
an act of exorcising his personal demons. Interjecting
the mainly abstract field with a sprinkling of figurative
images culled from art history, the artist grappled
with his own personal battles to put sense into
his wildest imaginings.
In the present show at the Galleria Duemila, which
ends on Nov. 28, Veneracion reinforces his subjects
with his trademark touches of layering, visual puns,
graffiti, and generous splashes of paint on canvases
mainly of the diptych or triptych format. Need we
add that here, too, in what seems like a spontaneous
clanging of brush and paint, Veneracion, battle-tested
through many artistic upheavals, has found greater
chaos to further stimulate his creative juices?
