Contemporary American Paintings

[Cast...@aol.com]

You are invited to visit an unusual web site featuring the extraordinary
paintings of Salvatore Ventura. The site provides public access to
complete information relating to the artist's entire body of work and
furnishes the most comprehensive resources available on the artist and
his work, including information to assist in the study, placement and
acquisition of the paintings. The site also provides one of the most
comprehensive directories of art museums on the internet.

Free postcards featuring Salvatore Ventura's paintings are mailed to
every 10th visitor who signs the guest book page. Further information can
also be received by email or US mail upon request. Dealer inquiries are
welcome.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

L. Castel

Email: Cast...@aol.com
Web site: http://www.salventura.com

ESSAY The first thing the perceptive viewer notices about the monumental
watercolors of Salvatore Ventura is that the medium of watercolor is
being coaxed to do something outside it's usual domain. Watercolor has
come to be associated with ephemeral nature because of it's ability to
record the effect of light and delicate subtleties. One thinks of the
heroic watercolors of Turner.

When it has been used in conjunction with urban life or architecture, it
has been primarily to record, to make notebook sketches. Ventura
convincingly gives watercolor the task of delineating a stolid subject
matter. The latent irony in his choice of medium, and the straightforward
way in which it succeeds, adds to the power of his work. Imperfect
details crop up: Ventura permits his translucent medium to bleed
occasionally and selectively. This declaration of vulnerability only
serves to call attention to the heroic use to which the artist is putting
his medium.

Ventura understands the power that can be gained from compression. He
works from photographs of entire facades but rigorously goes over the
photograph with a framing device to isolate parts of the whole. By
capturing only parts, Ventura confounds our usual expectations somewhat;
though subject matter is omnipresent, there is a reduction to pure form,
to geometry. In many respects Ventura is a geometric abstractionist.

But that there it a tie to reallity cannot be gotten away from and this
is the hidden strength of the work. This isn't abstraction but, as
Ventura puts it, "cold hard reality." He goes on to say as a general
philosophy, that "to some extent we're all involved in the hyper real," a
phrase which captures the hard-bitten temper of our times. This
uncompromising attitude works against the nostalgia that inevitably
accompanies the use of grand edifices as exclusive subject matter.
Ventura's cropping, using only a part of the whole, assures that the
paintings won't drift into picturesqueness, but will have above all an
elemental dynamism.

Letting part of a building stand for a whole is a very contemporary
attitude. The emphasis is thus less on the recording of a particular
building than on the artist himself controlling various ineffable but
dynamic forces. Most of Ventura's paintings are titled, but tellingly
when there are titles they hint at physical sensations. A painting which
features the capitol of an ionic column is called "Gravity"; the supports
of a balustrade of a stairway, highlighting an insistent modular
arrangement are "Rise and Fall"; a prominent yawing arch with a deep
interior shadow is enticingly called "Threshold."

Strengthening the elemental force of the work is Ventura's treatment of
shadow; he considers it, in his own words, as a separate object. It
doesn't adumbrate the architectural detail but is on par with the solid
masses. But there is an ineluctable de-stabilizing that goes along with
giving insubstantial shadow so much weight. It underscores a primary
point Ventura makes about his work. He declares that he is not painting
utopia.

The most intriguing parallel for Ventura's art is the visionary art of
the enlightenment in France. Architects in the 18th century envisioned
remarkable buildings that exploited sheer geometry. By reducing spheres,
cubes, and triangles to their essence, the architects were aiming at a
sort of utopia, one far above the humanity of the day but something for
humanity to aspire to. Ventura's work superficially resembles
Enlightenment schemes, but it is clearly based upon the past and not in
some envisioned future. His trick is not to make the viewer think of some
romantic past but in his fortunate phrase to give "visual CPR to his
subjects."

To resuscitate geometry is not the same as designing utopia, but it does
aim high. Ventura will forgive the viewer who senses excitement when
looking at his work; who senses that it more than cold, hard reality.

The buildings from which Ventura abstracts his compositions are actual
buildings, mostly in St. Louis where the artist has a related job,
recording architectural details for a preservation firm. His first work
in watercolor, "Art Museum" is the St. Louis Art Museum building designed
by Cass Gilbert, so began with a very high pedigree. He aspires to
returning to a museum as subject. The well-known curves of Frank Loyd
Wright's Guggenheim are ripe for Ventura's treatment.

Ultimately, Ventura's work is important because it participates in a
major, current art world dialogue. For the entire twentieth century the
development of art has meant abstract art. Returns to representational
subject matter have had the effect of refreshing abstraction when it
became too theoretical. These days there is a genuine appetite for
narrative content, which on the surface, would seem inimical to
abstraction.

Above all artists know how to meet challenge innovatively.

Ventura provides all the pleasures of a rigorous geometric abstraction
tied to a subject matter that at bottom carries great emotional weight.
And his watercolor medium rivets attention as a kind of tour de force.
Yet for all the diverse streams that feed it Salvatore Ventura's is
exceptionally single-minded art. It knows what it is about and
communicates with great poise and intelligence.

William Zimmer,
Contributing Critic, New York Times

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