Rodel Tapaya is one of the leading Filipino visual artists of his generation and belongs to the most acclaimed artists in Southeast Asia today. Due to exposure in international exhibitions and success in important regional art contests his works have gained renown and critical indorsement. He broke out in the art scene by earning the prestigious APB Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2011. Tapaya’s first one-man exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Philippines - the country’s premier modern and contemporary art museum - is currently on display till April 2014.

Rodel Tapaya's main piece at ARNDT Gallery's main Berlin location resists blatant interpretation. In his ex-pansive painting, The Chocolate Ruins, the blend of thematically related images impresses a conflated disquiet and a sense of simultaneous ironies. Speaking in the reconstructed and often esoteric language of folklore¬ - myths and legends and their transfer in barbershop talk and current events - his works resurface age-old wisdom to comment on our contemporary life. All the images are visually connected by parts of the cacao plant, scattered across the canvas, each one dedicated to the three major disasters that has devastated the Philippines during the past year; a magnitude 7.2 earthquake, Supertyphoon Haiyan, and the scandal over widespread misuse of congressional funds. Chocolates are easily a substitute for anything that corrupts, be it money, beauty, or tradition; an insinuation to its prominent role in the bittersweet aspirations and decline of Imperial Spain's colonial rule over the Phil-ippines. Other elements in the tragic tableau show vestiges of church ruins, makeshift shelters, storm clouds with faces, and helpless men. As our living and thinking increasingly adapt to the unremitting charge of information, artists like Rodel Tapaya have developed an ability to isolate particular parts of this dissonance and arrange them in fresh dramatic combinations. Tapaya has an awareness of the world as one would an ancient storyteller with insight developed in the context of the events that have altered into other things, and explores the implication of these dynamic and inexhaustible symbols and narratives in relation to one another. In a time and place when these myths and legends have become ruins as well, of national identity, the painter looks not to new discoveries to catalogue the human condition, but rather pathways among the thicket of things already known to our ancestors and his nation's literary heritage.

Image: © Rodel Tapaya
The Chocolate Ruins
2014
Acrylic on canvas
304.8 x 731.52cm
Courtesy of ARNDT Berlin