RODEL TAPAYA

Celebrated as one of the most important painters in Southeast Asia, Filipino artist Tapaya is known for his large-scale canvases, narrative murals and sculptural installations that evoke the primordial rainforests of indigenous folklore as allegories for the present reality. By forming thought-provoking instantiations of myth and contemporary existence—such as beastly incarnations of gods beside factories and television antennas—his works are both a retelling and a continuation of the oral and pictorial worlds of bygone eras.

In his latest body of works, Animals Moved by Music, Rodel Tapaya plumbs the faultlines through which the terrain of the everyday slides, shifts, and reconfigures. The paintings orbit around mundane transformations centered on private life and its never-ending negotiations with the outside world and its looming threat of contamination as well as its irresistible offer of self-actualization.

The title of the exhibition takes its cue from Franz Kakfa’s best-known novella, Metamorphosis. In it, the protagonist Gregor Samsa, who even transforming into a “monstrous vermin,” remains vulnerable to the seduction of music played by his sister Grete, is not a direct translation of the story, but a springboard to an examination of our contemporary predicament: the maladies of isolation, the terror of venturing out of the domestic space, the restoration of the old familiars. These instances of metamorphosis are conveyed by the characters who dominate the hierarchical scale of the paintings, both visceral and symbolic.

Animals Moved by Music flirts with the parameters of a parable, but offers a direct, undeniable link to our present-day conditions where we continue to reckon with what we have lost and what we have gained. The world-building in Tapaya’s paintings, with their grids and configurations, is one of perpetual reconstruction, as if to say that the invention of being human is never finished but is an amalgamation of a series of constant adjustments that occasionally, gives rise to momentary sparks of revelation.

This exhibition is held in collaboration with Arndt Art Agency.