RODEL TAPAYA
The Chocolate Ruins


Solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin
March 15 - April 26, 2014

Clicke here to view the list of exhibited works

Press Release

ARNDT Berlin.  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 until April 2014. Tapaya’s first solo exhibition in Europe The Chocolate Ruins will open at ARNDT Berlin from March 15, 2014 and will be on display until April 26, 2014.

Rodel Tapaya's main piece at ARNDT's primary location in Berlin resists blatant interpretation. In his expansive 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 Philippines. 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.

A publication - surveying his oeuvre of the past 10 years - edited on the occasion of Tapaya’s solo show Bato-Balani at the Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines will be launched during the Art Fair Philippines and also presented at the Berlin opening of The Chocolate Ruins.

PRESS | RANDIAN | Rodel Tapaya | The Chocolate Ruins

Rodel Tapaya | Tiroche deLeon Collection 2014
www.tirochedeleon.com

Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, Installation view, ARNDT Berlin, 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, Installation view, ARNDT Berlin, 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, Installation view, ARNDT Berlin, 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, Installation view, ARNDT Berlin, 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, Installation view, ARNDT Berlin, 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, Installation view, ARNDT Berlin, 2014 Rodel Tapaya in his studio, 2014 Rodel Tapaya in his studio, 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 304,8 x 731,52 cm | 120 x 288 in, # TAPA0031 | Big work for the ARNDT Berlin exhibition "The Chocolate Ruins", 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Chocolate Ruins, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 304,8 x 731,52 cm | 120 x 288 in, # TAPA0031 | Big work for the ARNDT Berlin exhibition "The Chocolate Ruins", 2014 Rodel Tapaya, The Fake Pearl, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 152,4 cm | 48 x 60 in, # TAPA0044 Rodel Tapaya, The Fake Pearl, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 152,4 cm | 48 x 60 in, # TAPA0044 Rodel Tapaya, Ground Breaking, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 152,4 cm | 48 x 60 in, # TAPA0045 Rodel Tapaya, Ground Breaking, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 152,4 cm | 48 x 60 in, # TAPA0045 Rodel Tapaya, Healing Miracle, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 182,88 cm | 48 x 72 in, # TAPA0046 Rodel Tapaya, Healing Miracle, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 182,88 cm | 48 x 72 in, # TAPA0046 Rodel Tapaya, Outpouring, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 182,88 cm | 48 x 72 in, # TAPA0047 Rodel Tapaya, Outpouring, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 121,92 x 182,88 cm | 48 x 72 in, # TAPA0047 Rodel Tapaya, Whisper Cutter, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 193,04 x 152,4 cm | 76 x 60 in, # TAPA0043 Rodel Tapaya, Whisper Cutter, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 193,04 x 152,4 cm | 76 x 60 in, # TAPA0043 Rodel Tapaya, The Waiting, 2014, Oil and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0051 Rodel Tapaya, The Waiting, 2014, Oil and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0051 Rodel Tapaya, Reunion, 2014, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0050 Rodel Tapaya, Meeting with Self, 2014, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0049 Rodel Tapaya, Meeting with Self, 2014, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0049 Rodel Tapaya, Crossing Over, 2014, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0048 Rodel Tapaya, Crossing Over, 2014, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 77 x 56,5 cm | 30.31 x 22.24 in, # TAPA0048