Provenance: Provenance: Galleria Duemila, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Jose Joya is concerned with stippled fields of color defined by carefully articulated boundaries. The painting marks a transitional phase in the development of the artist’s style, from an exploding kind of composition to containment of forms within pictorial space. The gestural strokes create a motion that is implied in the relationship between the leaf-like forms and space. The delicate leaf forms invigorate and charge the visual field with a lush abundance of energy that covers the entire space with a pictorial exuberance. Various tonalities interplay with bright color accents. Nothing kept Joya from seeing the world with a renewed vision. Amid the interlocking of figures with leafy shapes, negative voids are transformed into positive entities. For Joya, amorphous surfaces of color will never exhaust its possibilities for art, and herein lay the secret of his aesthetic optimism. The almost austere geometric organic abstractions have more of a compositional look utterly different from other notable abstract expressionist painters such as Pollock and De Kooning. Here, Joya renders the pristine and lush beauty of the verdant countryside into a figurative and contemplative piece. By doing so, he effectively transports the viewer into the allure of the scene by mere shape and color.