Provenance: Private Collection, USA

ABOUT THE WORK

Is abstractionism really abstract? Jose Joya doesn’t seem to think so. As paradoxical though this may seem, in terms of portraying one’s innermost feelings, it can be even more realist than realism. Jose Joya has made a substantial reputation as an artist whose singular oeuvre is one of the most complexes by anyone of his generation. Joya’s art contains elements of both Chinese and Western painting traditions that merge to make singularly intimate works. At the core of his art are modernism’s freedom and a freshness of spirit that immediately draws one into his vision of the world. Joya is the acknowledged as the country’s foremost exponent of abstract expressionism today. Joya’s abstract expressionism – before he went to true action paintings- was more of a dramatic, bravura laden type. He started to use huge brushes and trowels, much like a mason. At the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the late 1950s, Joya was so obsessed with gestural strokes; he liberated himself from his academic training at the University of the Philippines. Joya’s identification with the style of international abstractionism in art was the result of hi studies in America in the later Fifties, at a time when he was most impressionable because young and just out of school, in spite of his experience in Spain (it was his first trip to Europe), in 1954 and 1955, during which he could hardly paint in that Iberian milieu. Used to the rigid disciplines of his classically oriented mentors at the University of the Philippines, Joya found himself in America, in 1956 and 1957. The US study grant included a period of orientation in New York, where he underwent a massive exposure to the works of abstract expressionists. Suddenly, he was bursting out of the pattern with thick spattering and spatulates of color and pigment, under the heady inspiration of the American action painters, who were peaking morphologically during that period and even earlier, with the school gradually scattering its energies and differentiating into various styles and variants in th sixties