Jose Joya

Acquired directly from the artist 

Francisco Arcellana, Joya, Dick Baldovino Enterprises, Manila, 1996, double-page color illustration

This work is in good overall condition as viewed. There is evidence of very light wear along the edges of the work due to abrasions with the frame, but this does not affect the overall image. There are very small spots of paint loss below the center area, possibly inherent to the work. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals tiny spots of restoration primarily at the edges and at a light orange field next to the circle in the lower right quadrant. All other inconsistencies are consistent with the nature of the board and artist's working method. Framed.
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“…the artist is concretizing his need for communication. He has an irresistible urge to reach that level of spiritual satisfaction and to project what he is and what he thinks through his work.” - Jose Joya

Jose Joya is celebrated as one of the first modern artists in the Philippines to venture into abstraction. His avant-garde, fresh style marked a distinct departure from the customary path of his contemporaries, who explored their creativity within the boundaries of representational art. Finding an affinity within the American School of Abstract Expressionism, Joya produced dynamic works while in the frenzy of Action Painting. This quintessential broad and gestural style not only resulted in a personal dialogue, unique to Joya, but it would later represent the collective consciousness of the nation.

The present lot, a shaped panel composition, truly depicts the Filipino soul. This rare work conjures an image of rice padi fields, filtered through the caprices of Joya’s imagination. A quintessential part of life and livelihood in the nation, padi fields frequent the rural countryside in the Philippines.  Harmonizing his personal responses with the natural environment, Joya conjures images of a tranquil moment. It is imaginable that Joya was concerned with articulating his sensory experience upon beholding this magnificent countryside.

This vista, morphed into the suspended fields sprawling across the subconscious, presents a subject so intertwined within the memories, thoughts and dreams of the Filipino people. Portrayed from an aerial viewpoint, the scene transforms into a fiery assemblage of warmly colored arenas, reduced to their basic geometries. Rather than emulating the details of the landscape with technical verisimilitude, he captures the sensations he absorbed from the view, ultimately immortalizing his ephemeral perception.

Given Joya’s penchant for form and structure, which is so evident in this particular work, it is no surprise that he had an interest in architecture at a fledgling age. Though he was introduced to the impressionist style and romanticized works of Filipino maestros Fernando Amorsolo and Tolentino when studying in the University of the Philippines, the young artist felt more an affinity toward the budding trends of modernism in his nation, which was at the time only at its most infant stages. In 1953, he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art as the university’s first Magna cum Laude student in history. That same year, Joya was one of the youngest artists who participated in the first Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala at the Philippine Art Gallery and would rise quickly to standing as one of the primary advocates of this New York inspired idiom, characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity.

Joya reduces the panoramic landscape to its simplest forms, echoing geometries that appear in the works by American abstract expressionists Robert Delauney and Hans Hoffman. In the eminent words of Hofmann, “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Jose Joya deemed the minutiae of the image insignificant, emphasizing more on the unity of lines and color planes that manifested the overall essence of the picture. The shapes in Love Rites become more curved as they extend towards the edges of the canvas. Joya imbues the work is a lyrical moment by incorporating a circular shape at the bottom right of the work, one that stands out against the others.

In his non-representational works, Delauney presents variegated shapes wedged together to form an indiscernible mass hanging across the picture plane. Though Delauney acknowledges the flat nature of his canvas, he also permeates the painting with a sense of depth by purposefully overlapping these shapes and utilizing contrasting color tones. Similarly, Joya invents an element of perspective by modulating and saturating certain hues he may have found most striking in his landscape, eventually confining them in enclosed compartments. Despite the fact that neither artist imbues their works with a vanishing point, they manage to imbue their works with three-dimensionality with the power of color.

With his sharp understanding of color theory, Joya utilizes a premeditated, luscious array of hues to almost magically cause some amorphous forms to recede into the distance, while others protrude. By meticulously placing these blocks of color against one another, he creates chromatic tensions and releases in his composition, ultimately creating the impression of a landscape. As supported by Wassily Kandinsky’s revered color theories documented in his writing Du Spirituel dans L’art, cooler tones such as Joya’s gray blocks possess a ‘concentric movement’ and thus, they appear to move away from the viewer^[1]. In contrast, the warmer areas such as the bright orange contours appear to move closer towards the spectator.

Red, contrarily, is considered a forceful color that Kandinsky described as ‘lively and agitated’; it may carry with it the element of passion so imbued within the title that Joya chose: ‘Love Rites’. In order to create the brown tones, Joya needed to mix black with red, in order to produce a ‘harder’ tone^[2]. However, he invented the oranges by mixing yellow and red. These oranges impart an ‘irradiating movement on its surroundings’, almost illuminating the surrounding environment^[3].

Joya ensconces these color fields with sweeping, graceful black outlines and calligraphic gesticulations. These are linear forces that provide a sense of stability to the work, as well as creating the illusion of shadows. The brushstrokes appear to have been applied buoyantly with western gestural strokes, when coloring in planes and lines that were predetermined and meticulously planned. Joya applied paint spontaneously and passionately, using brushes or spatula and sometimes directly squeezed from tube and splashed across picture plane. Rather than blending tones to create measured gradations that could result in a realistic image, Joya strictly concerns himself with compositional arrangement, three-dimensional illusion and color relationships. 

Joya dedicated his life to capturing the whims of his vivid imagination, from intuitions, reveries and emotions, through the lens of abstract forms. Eight years after his death, he was deemed a National Artist for his groundbreaking efforts in pioneering Filipino abstraction. This impressive, rare painting stands as a testament to one of the most significant artists in modern Filipino art history and one of the first advocates of abstract art in the nation.

¹ Kandinsky, Du spirituel dans l'art, éd. Denoël, 1989, p. 148

² Refer to 1, p. 160 

³ Refer to 1, p. 162