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

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist

Literature: Arcellana, Francisco. Joya. Manila: Dick Baldovino Enterprises, 1996. Full-color photograph. Listed as "Save the Earth, April 19, 1993" in Joya's Catalogue of Works compiled by Ruben D.F. Defeo.

ABOUT THE WORK

When Jose Joya finished painting the work at hand on April 19, 1993, annual celebrations around the world for Earth Day 1993 were only beginning to commence. Founded in 1970, Earth Day, according to its official website, “is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national and local policy changes.” Grounded in its mission “to diversify, educate, and activate” the global environmental movement, Earth Day became an international event in 1990, with the first observance in the Philippines commencing on April 22, 1990. The reds in this piece symbolize the living world as the lifeblood of all the creatures that depend on nature’s blessings to survive. The blues represent the waters, the vital element that sustains life on Earth. One can notice how Joya applies the slashes and blobs of paint instantaneously. It is as if he represents all of us, rapidly racing against the clock, crying out to everyone, and exclaiming the gravity of the Earth’s situation and the urgency of collective action and putting an end to a mercenary and exploitative system to save the Earth, before we all woefully cling at the end of the rope, pleading before nature’s unforgiving wrath. Joya’s compelling abstract expressionism stresses our collective responsibility in nurturing, cultivating, and conserving the world we live in. A work with a similar theme titled The Ozone (1992) was recently auctioned by León Gallery last June 2023. (Adrian Maranan)