Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist
confirming the authenticity of this lot

ABOUT THE WORK

With artworks that are immensely evocative, Rodel Tapaya is without limits when it comes to combining artistic elements to create a narrative. As an artist, he is fascinated by folktales and myths, exploring this through multifarious aspects as he experiments on folk aesthetics and materials to create his personal visual language. In this 2015 piece titled Shame, the contemporary artist paints with his visual language to portray the emotion of shame on the man’s face. A Tapaya piece stands out from the rest with the aid of his masterful use of native mythologies and legends as a means of analyzing the often hazy and harsh realities of life. His works are a combination of various aspects of everyday life painted into one seamless tapestry. Starting with a rough sketch, the fine artist adds fresh touches after reading more stories, morphing his painting into something new as his ideas move around. According to the book titled Rodel Tapaya, there was a time when the Filipino artist felt entrapped within the dense jungles of his own creation. He wished to "loosen" his paintings so that "more fluid and dark themes" might be explored. For a while, he veered away from myth and folklore in favor of a more expressionist palette with monochromatic, mainly gray figures. Tapaya once said that reading folk stories and mythologies makes his imagination explode with images. Since the narratives do not have an actual archetype or image, he was free to imagine and give the characters its own forms. “I find this very exciting,” he said. (P.I.R.)