Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mr. Alexander Richard Joya Baldovino confirming the authenticity of this lot

ABOUT THE WORK

The Manunggul Jar and Joya: Wedding the Oriental and the Native On another important note, Joya's venture into geometric expressionism came as a result of an inner reawakening of his native sensibility, which was due in part to homesickness and the resurgence of Filipino nationalism during the tumultuous ‘60s. Although immersed in American soil, Joya also found himself studying Philippine history. "At this time, the study of Philippine history engaged me," says Joya in art critic Leonidas Benesa's Joya: Drawings. "Digging into rare sources, I came across materials that gave light facets to Philippine history." By this time, Filipino historians Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino had been propagating a nationalist historiography aimed at decolonizing Philippine history. The Joya of the late 1960s successfully cast away his Western-influenced abstract expressionism in favor of a profound expression of a Filipino identity in his art. A Manila Bulletin review of Joya’s new geometric works exhibited in his homecoming show at the Luz Gallery in late 1970 writes, “Joya’s new pieces bear a marked departure from his familiar abstract expressionist style, often repeated in series….Joya...was preoccupied with primitive symbolic graffiti recalling ancient Filipino drawings found in burial pottery….[It is] a new enthusiasm to explore the pre-Hispanic Philippine visual symbols.” The review references “burial pottery,” likely the Manunggul Jar, excavated in 1964 in Lipuun Point, Palawan, in the Manunggul Cave that forms part of the archaeologically rich Tabon Cave Complex. The Manunggul Jar, hailed as a magnum opus of Philippine pre-colonial civilization, represents the soul’s entry into the afterlife and underscores the importance of water in our ancestors’ notions of life and death. The archaeological significance of the jar intrigued the homesick, New York-based Joya. As a result, Joya began incorporating and referencing the jar’s curvilinear designs into his works, particularly in Virgo. “[Joya] adumbrated [the design of the Manunggul Jar] into a series of paintings,” writes in the cover notes December 1971 issue of The Philippines Quarterly. The magazine recounts that Joya was “so struck by the originality of the design of these ancient relics.” Combined with the subject embodying the mysticism of the anting-anting (amulet) and the fact that seriality is ubiquitous in Philippine indigenous art (e.g., weaving, embroidery, ornamentation), Joya had now arrived at a creative idiom that is not only entirely his own but more so reflects the collective identity and indigenous pride of his people. Unlike his abstract expressionist works that possess a “central core” from which the composition is anchored, or in the words of the artist, “the seat of energy,” Joya’s mandalas derive their energy from the entirety of the composition, possessing a logical balance of all elements. It is an artistic expression representative of a people whose shared identity and culture are rooted in a constant struggle towards exploring, redefining, and reclaiming our nationhood through the lens of meditating on our indigenous past. (Adrian Maranan)