Beauty of disruption

A back-to-back exhibition was recently held at the Goldenberg Mansion late last year. It was the brilliant pairing of two of the country’s renowned contemporary artists, Olan Ventura and Ronson Culibrina. Ventura’s Fractured Blooms & The Art of Disruption and Culibrina’s Revisiting the Past, Rethinking the Present are both redefining Filipino heritage, identity and aesthetics — provoking feelings and conversations between the past and the present, chaos and beauty.

At first glance, Olan Ventura’s still-lifes appear familiar, even classical. But a closer look reveals a different story: Ventura’s floral compositions are anything but still. In “Prismatic Petals,” his flowers are dissected and interrupted, sliced into pieces by bands of vibrant color that evoke the glitch of a faulty screen or a printer’s error.

“Sometimes you have to destroy beauty in order to create a new kind of beauty,” Ventura says of his process.

The “Prismatic Petals” collection can be seen as a commentary on the instability of beauty in the digital age, every image we consume is subject to disruption, interference, and reinterpretation. Ventura’s use of fragmentation mirrors our contemporary experience: we live in a world of fractured realities, where the natural and the synthetic overlap, and where even the most timeless forms — like a simple flower — are filtered through the lens of technology.

Ronson Culibrina’s latest series, “Marahuyo,” reinterprets the iconic works of Fernando Amorsolo through distortion and disruption, layering contemporary pop culture symbols onto the pastoral landscapes. The work is like an explosion of cultural references — a chaotic fusion of the old and the new. Where images from the East and West collide — traditional rural Philippines meets modern consumerism. His reimagined Amorsolo works ask us to rethink the past, to question narratives about Filipino identity. “I grew up with these images of rural life,” Culibrina explains, “But as I’ve grown, I’ve realized that the Filipino experience is more complex. It’s not just about nostalgia; it’s about how we adapt, how we blend traditions with modernity, and how we navigate an increasingly interconnected world.”

What links these two exhibitions — Ventura’s fragmented florals and Culibrina’s pop culture-laden Amorsolo interventions — is a shared fascination with disruption. Both artists grapple with the tension between the old and the new, the natural and the digital, the local and the global. And yet, within that tension, both find moments of beauty and clarity. Resonating with the pair’s aesthetic is the Goldenberg Mansion, a space that itself embodies a dialogue between history and modernity. Situated in the heart of Manila, the mansion is a testament to the city’s colonial past, now reimagined as a vibrant cultural hub.

This exhibition provided a window into the evolving landscape of Filipino art. As the country grapples with its place in a globalized world, artists like Ventura and Culibrina are leading the way, challenging us to rethink what it means to be Filipino in the 21st century.