Ana Perez Ventura - Maus Contemporary

portrait of Ana Perez Ventura

Ana Pérez Ventura (b.1981, Santiago de Compostela, Spain) is a visual artist whose practice is deeply rooted in her background as a classical pianist.

Perez Ventura's work is process-oriented, focusing on translating the time-based nature of music into different visual media, primarily painting. Using rhythmic repetition, like a human metronome, she creates an organic record of the passage of time.
Pérez Ventura transforms the ephemeral into the tangible, giving form and substance to the elusive nature of time.

She studied Fine Arts (painting) at the Universities of Vigo and Barcelona and Music (piano) at the conservatories of Vigo and Amsterdam. In 2011, she obtained a master's degree in music from Sorbonne University, focusing on the relations between the two disciplines. Since then, she has resided in Paris, researching the possibilities of interaction between the visual arts and music, using repetition as a framework.

Pérez Ventura has won several prizes and scholarships, including the Taylor Foundation Prize (2023, France), Artension Prize (2014, France), Barrié de la Maza Foundation Scholarship (2010, Spain), and the Segundo Gil Dávila Foundation Scholarship (2009, Spain). She has held solo exhibitions at prestigious French and Spanish venues such as Sorbonne University, Colegio de España, Museo del Mar, and the Maison des Étudiants Suédois. Additionally, she has participated in group exhibitions in Spain (CGAC, Auditorio de Galicia, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Espacio OTR), France (Château de la Veyrie de Bernin, Abstract Project, Parc Floral), USA (Frank Juarez gallery), Germany (Kunstwerk Carlshütte), and China (Guoyi Art Museum).

Her work is in various public collections, including the CGAC Museum in Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the Collection of the Diputación de Ourense in Spain, and the Collection of the Colegio de España at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris in France.

Pérez Ventura’s projects for 2024 include her first solo show in the USA at Maus Contemporary and group shows at the Wu Dengyi Art Museum in Taipei, Taiwan and at Abstract Project Gallery in Paris, France.

click to access Ana Pérez Ventura's current CV

Ana Perez Ventura at the piano“Her training as a pianist is the basis of her art. To develop the necessary qualities to a concert performer, a pianist must spend hours repeating the same gestures so that the body can internalize and integrate them. The artist establishes a synesthesia, an equivalence between music and painting and thus becomes a kind of human metronome. Music gives the impulse and the work visually explores the passage of time which is then reflected in the process of creating images.

Indeed, in the same way that a pianist must practice, repeat, memorize his scales and in the same way that a composer builds a score with motifs assembled in a certain order, the artist, involving her body by similar gestures, repeats again and again, on canvas or on paper, patterns in a particular order, while superimposing them. Ana adds strata of colors and shapes to create her artworks. Likewise, the musician’s memory, notes and gestures superimpose the notes to make a synthesis, a melody, a music. Ana Pérez Ventura finds beauty in the technical aspects of her exercises, just like an athlete could find as much beauty in her training as in her victories. Her gestures measure and count time and, by inscribing themselves in space, her works make visible the music which, in essence, is impalpable”.

- Hélianthe Bordeaux-Maurin, Art Historian

Ana Pérez Ventura portrait by G. SavardIn the beginning there is the contact of the fingertip with he piano key. A few millimeters of skin touch a piece of wood, and the sound becomes a reality. Ana Pérez Ventura has repeated this gesture millions of times during her life as a pianist. However after so many years, she questions this corporal and artistic activity, as if the mystery were still present.

She is an artist who practices two artistic disciplines at the same time, which are both very demanding. Her practices in painting and music are communicated, harmonized, fused, talk to each other, always through gesture. In both cases, the hands and the body must incessantly learn the discipline of beauty, since there is nothing less natural for human beings than to make a sound appear, a color. In other words, the artist always has to repeat and repeat, until that which is strange, painful, unbearable is so deeply engraved in their body that it becomes an integral part of it.

In her artwork, Ana Pérez Ventura does not represent music, but “making” music. She shows the intimate, corporal and at the same time universal part of the music that is being created. In this way she reveals an invisible part of the world, through her emotions, because this is her role as an artist.

The practice of music, like that of painting, is often inaccessible to those who are not artists. Under the sober, minimalist appearance of a deep meditation on the line, there is a liberating, relieving, pleasurable work. Beyond the hours of grief and tedium of the artist who repeats the same gesture without ceasing, there is the joy of the music that runs through their flesh, the ecstasy of a percussive trance and the pleasure of merging with that vital breath that enlivens all things – and that art causes us to directly feel, in its most deprived and immediate forms. (…)

Ana Pérez Ventura "Etude Nr. 146", 2013The Études series began several years ago. This in-depth investigation of the repetition of the circular gesture is an acrylic work where continuous white lines and blue glazes are superimposed. The repetition time of the musical gesture disappears forever; this pictorial work allows the artist to record it definitively. Each canvas is the embodiment of a studio, which, like musical studios, allows you to integrate a technical gesture corporeally. Extensive color, hypnotic movement of line, each work is animated by the presence of the artist’s hand and at the same time with her musical obsession that takes shape. (…)

(…) through her different explorations, what the artist reveals to us is the synesthetic dimension of all art: sound can be translated into color, a form can be heard, because everything is movement, everything is energy – since beauty transcends all forms, limits and languages. In this exhibition, linking scores, gestures and painting, Ana Pérez Ventura reminds us in her way that painting is always a performance and that music is always corporal.

- Audrey Bartis, Semiologist and Art theoretician

“In my Études, I explore the temporality of the pictorial gesture. The paintings are the result of the rhythmic repetition of the same circular gesture that leaves a mark on the surface of the canvas with the addition or subtraction of paint. The repetition of this gesture creates a weave on the pictorial surface. Thus, the final image is the result of overlapping layers of painting that give the rise to an infinity of subtle variations in color and depth games.

Ana Pérez Ventura "Etude Nr. 159", 2013

My art is directly related to another facet of my life; music. As a pianist and musical performer, I translate the signs of a score in a choreography of movements on the keyboard that lead to sound. In the case of painting the choreography of movements, gestures creates the marks on the canvas. The term étude (study) comes from the musical field. In music an study is a piece intended to work a specific problem (usually technical) which translates into a gesture, a concrete physical movement. Usually, studies are built around a single musical material, rhythmic and melodic patterns which are repeated with slight variations, and create a continuous musical writing that visually reminds one of a tapestry”.

- Ana Pérez Ventura