Provenance: West Gallery

ABOUT THE WORK

In his highly suggestive figurative works, Rodel Tapaya doesn’t play safe as he combines different elements to generate a narrative. Rightfully, his works may be considered as tableau or staging grounds to introspectively examine the stories of human culture. Such fearlessness is evident in this work, Manama. The natural, albeit uncanny, features of the landscape cohere together to create a scowling portrait of an old woman, whose pair of seemingly dead eyes look squarely at the viewer. Straddling between the figurative and the abstract, is the figure a harbinger of doom or a merciful news-bearer of things to come? Whatever role she plays in a story that only she knows, she is an unavoidable character to have emerged from Tapaya’s fecund imagination.