Rodel Tapaya

The work is in good condition overall, as is the canvas. There are indications of minor wear and handling around the edges. The paint layer are well-preserved and stable. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed, on stretcher.
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Rodel Tapaya’s large-scale, skillfully composed paintings have the character of busily rendered remembrance from a particularly unsettling dream life. Gods and goddesses, creatures, and people going about everyday life, gathering, and enacting strange rituals slide between historical periods and cultural styles in a seeming parody of myth and narrative painting. The work is at once instantly familiar and utterly peerless. This makes Tapaya essential to contemporary figuration in Philippine art.

In this particular painting Tapaya depicts the story of a man who finds gold in an old man’s house. The old man tells him he can get as much gold as he wants while he is away on the condition that he does not tell anyone, or else the gold will vanish. However, the man has a slip of tongue and loses his wealth. A reminder that one’s wealth need not to be shown outwardly but rather kept in the boundaries of one’s gratefulness and humility.  Tapaya complemented his thick images with scenes from previous paintings such as “The Legend of the Guava,” about a ruthless king who was turned into crowned fruit in his afterlife. His work is characterized by an inimitable blend of realism and surrealist pattern-making. The events in his painting work against backdrops of wild flora and fauna, architecture, industrial settings, or uncanny and often barren landscapes. These figures, evenly placed in his paintings, often have the appearance of being frozen in time removed of a historical referent or elements belonging to different worlds. Scale is frequently arbitrary, which adds to an overall fantastic atmosphere; the spatial relationships construct their own fantasy realm.

Tapaya was born in 1980 in Montalban, Rizal, in the Philippines where he continues to live and work, and studied at the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines and underwent intensive studies at the University of Helsinki and at the Parsons School of Design. He won the 2011 Signature Art Prize given by the Singapore Art Museum and the Asia-Pacific Breweries Foundation for his piece entitled “Cane of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted.”