The artfully arranged assemblages of fruit, flowers, and vegetables immediately reference the great traditions of Dutch and Italian practice. They are intense unions of colour, texture, and contour where his fluent command of the medium makes for a bravura display of material reality. These pictures show what the casual glance often overlooks and focus on the essentially sensual, pulling our eye to the plush velvet fragility of a rose petal, the pitted, scarred skin of a lemon, the glistening hint of moisture on a carmine-crimson cherry. They are intimately scaled essays in appetite, metabolite, and decay.
The images are simulacra, obsessively rendered to be more permanent than that which they depict. His compositions propose succulent, mouth-watering materiality. Ideas of control and appetite interplay: we are caught between discipline and desire, our hunger provoked all too aware that we are viewing a vibrantly realistic illusion.
Ventrone paints still life, figures, and seascapes.
