New Jersey Stage logo
New Jersey Stage Menu


"False Indigo" at Hoboken's Proto Gallery


By Brent Johnson, JerseyArts.com

originally published: 06/21/2017

These aren’t the kind of floral paintings you’ll find hanging in the lobby of most motels or for sale at your local department store.

At first glance, you might not even realize that some of the Rob Ventura pieces that currently line the walls at Proto Gallery in Hoboken depict flowers at all. They’re filled with abstract shapes, wild brushstrokes and deep, dark hues of red, orange, purple and black.

Plus, they all share something unusual: Each painting is named after a poisonous flower.

Welcome to “False Indigo,” a show of 17 oil-on-canvas paintings by Ventura, a 28-year-old artist who has been living and working in Hoboken for the last four years. It’s his first solo exhibition at Proto, a contemporary art gallery located in the city’s old Neumann Leather building.

Ventura calls himself an abstract painter, but for this exhibit — which is free and runs through July 29 — he wanted “some kind of subject matter to the paintings.”




New Jersey Stage provides affordable advertising for the arts, click here for info



18595215_1338772936159209_8873471452438451794_o

“Flowers are part of the natural world,” he explains. “But I thought flowers and florals are pretty abstract. They are reminiscent of the gestures of abstract painting.”

And why did he pick toxic ones?

“It sounds sexier,” Ventura says with a smile. “They’re flowers, but they’re also kind of punk rock. They’re a little grungy. They’ve got some edge to them.”

Ventura was raised in Berkeley Heights but did undergrad work at Boston College. Originally, his focus was on music, playing bass guitar in rock and funk bands. But there was a problem.

“It was really hard to play music on campus,” he recalls. “It was loud and there wasn’t really a lot of practice space.”

So Ventura added an arts major and eventually received a master’s degree in art from Boston University.




New Jersey Stage provides affordable advertising for the arts, click here for info



DSC_6680

“I liked the fact that art was more self-directed,” he says. “I could do it on my own. I didn’t have to get together a group of people to play.”

Since then, Ventura has been active in the New York art scene and has had solo shows in other places, such as one in Jersey City last summer.

But his home base is Proto, where he has rented studio space the last few years.

Sculptor Nick De Pirro opened the gallery four years ago in a large brick building that once housed the Neumann Leather factory in downtown Hoboken. The goal was to bring a New York-styled commercial gallery to the other side of the Hudson River.

“I thought it would be nice to have this kind of thing on the Jersey side but still be linked to New York,” De Pirro remembers. “Sort of create an orbit for Jersey artists.”

Originally, the gallery hosted only group exhibitions. But in recent months, Proto has added solo shows to the mix. Ventura’s is the third.

De Pirro says “False Indigo” is a vehicle for Ventura’s “really aggressive painting style.”

Rob Ventura_English Bluebell

“The paint has a lot of action,” De Pirro says. “And what I like about the show is: You have big colorful canvasses that also have a conceptual framework. It’s not just the color. It’s not just a canvas. He has an underlying intelligence to it that keeps me interested in it.”




New Jersey Stage provides affordable advertising for the arts, click here for info



Ventura also used an interesting process to craft the paintings in the show. First, Ventura explains, he took images from Vincent Van Gogh’s series of flower paintings and put them into Photoshop, “digitally manipulating them to create a new composition.” He then projected the images onto his canvases and painted over the projections.

“It hard to see the reference,” Ventura says of the Van Gogh influence. “They kind of become their own thing.”

All of it stems from Ventura’s love of pop art — including artists like Roy Lichtenstein, who often appropriated the work of comic books and other artists to create new pieces.

“I like working with preexisting imagery,” Ventura says. “It’s kind of a jump-off point.”

Once the paintings were done, Ventura looked through images of poisonous flowers and assigned the pieces titles based on the flowers they most resembled.

proto3

“False Indigo,” the show’s title painting — and one of the larger pieces on display — is named after the Baptisia australias, a toxic blue-purple flower found in the Midwest that was once used by Native Americans and Europeans to dye clothes. Hence its nickname, “false indigo.”

The exhibit is also a showcase for a new branch of Ventura’s catalogue: sculpture. There are seven ceramic pieces in the middle of the room — jagged works that look almost like coral.

They are the first sculptural work Ventura has done since his college undergrad days.

“I was kind of experimenting,” he says. “I wasn’t planning on putting ceramics into the show. But I made a couple of pieces and I really liked them. They’re nice complements to the paintings.”

The ceramics also have a theme — but not flowers. Each sculpture is named after a fossil.

larger“I think they have a kind of prehistoric vibe — an evolutionary vibe,” Ventura explains.

While “False Indigo” takes up Proto’s first floor, the second floor is currently home to “Soft Reboot,” an exhibit Ventura curated featuring pieces from 25 artists who have been involved with the gallery over its first four years.

Proto is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. It’s by appointment only on weekdays.

“We want to continue to do group shows upstairs whenever we can,” says De Pirro, the gallery’s owner. “We want that community to orbit around our space. It’s bringing back the history of the last four years in this building.”

Adds Ventura: “We have a really good active crew of young, emerging artists. It’s kind of the real deal.”





About the author: Brent Johnson is a pop-culture-obsessed writer from East Brunswick, N.J. He's currently a reporter for The Star-Ledger of Newark. Before that, he was a longtime entertainment and music columnist for The Trenton Times. His work has also been published by Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated On Campus and Night & Day Magazine. His favorite musical artists: Elvis Costello, Billy Joel, The Smiths, Roxy Music, Dave Matthews Band, The Beatles, Blur, Squeeze, The Kinks. When he's not writing, Brent is the lead singer in alt-rock band The Clydes

Content provided by Discover Jersey Arts, a project of the ArtPride New Jersey Foundation and New Jersey State Council on the Arts.



FEATURED EVENTS

To narrow results by date range, categories,
or region of New Jersey
click here for our advanced search.


Art

Art on Screen - Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers

Monday, February 24, 2025 @ 7:30pm
Monmouth University - Pollak Theatre
400 Cedar Avenue, West Long Branch, NJ 07764
category: art

Click here for full event listing

 

More events

Event Listings are available for $10 and included with our banner ad packages




 

EVENT PREVIEWS

Jodi

Jodi Gerbi: Hope & Resilience

If all you need to see in a gallery show is an exhibition of superior painting skills, "Hope and Resilience" has got you covered. Jodi Gerbi can handle a brush as well as anybody in Hudson County can. The carnival hues of her oil painting, the drama of her modest-sized canvases, the balance in composition and interaction of light and shadow, her knack for suggesting the synthetic — all of this speaks to her confidence, her training, and her astonishing dexterity.



Novado

Novado Gallery presents "I Said What I Said" group exhibition

(JERSEY CITY, NJ) -- Novado Gallery presents I Said What I Said, a group exhibition that asserts the power of artistic voice, truth, and presence. The exhibit runs from March 8 through April 18, 2025. Curated by Jerome China, the exhibit celebrates the role of artists in shaping identity and challenging societal norms through unfiltered, direct, and fearless artistic expression.



The

The Art House Gallery presents "Reconstructions" by Sarah J. Mueller

(JERSEY CITY, NJ) -- Art House Productions proudly presents "Reconstructions" by Artist Sarah J. Mueller. The exhibition runs from Saturday, March 1 through Sunday, March 30, 2025. Sarah's recent work challenges traditional portraiture by removing its fundamental purpose – to capture and honor a specific subject.



Jaune

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's Six-Decade-Long Career Culminates with Curation of Largest Museum Exhibition of Contemporary Native American Art Now on View at Zimmerli Art Museum

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- Currently on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always is an unprecedented survey of contemporary Native American art, the largest of its kind to date, curated by the late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation).



Oyster

Oyster Point Gallery presents works by Dawn DiCicco

(RED BANK, NJ) -- The Oyster Point Gallery presents works by Dawn DiCicco from February 21 through March 31, 2025. Dawn paints expressively to create complex and evocative works that convey explosive or meditative moments. This exhibit offers an in-depth look at her large and small-scale works. It also marks the beginning of her year as a 2025 Artist in Residence, a title she previously held in 2022.










New Jersey Stage provides affordable advertising for the arts, click here for info