This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by Mrs. Josefa Joya-Baldovino confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

This work comes between his 1959 “Space Transfiguration” stage and the Yeseria stage. In 1959, Joya further explored his spatial concepts in several canvases of large dimensions, such as “City Entering the Edge of Sundown” and “Space Transfiguration”. In these, the artist meant to create a total environment and the visual experience consists in being enveloped in a pervasive and resonant space modified by light and atmosphere. From this evolved the Yeseria series, (Yesenia being the intricate relief work of Spanish mud jar structures) characterized by a style of impacted shapes, interlocking, jewel like facets that glowed from within and at the same time reflected the all-pervasive light. Gesture is very important in this kind of painting. Joya’s vigorous style in the mid-1960s indeed shows affinity with abstract expressionism in its kinetic impulse, its strong gestural drive, its bold and sensuous handling of the medium with open assertion of the materiality of the work. However, a closer acquaintance with the artist’s work of this period will reveal certain fundamental differences with the action painters, particularly with Jackson Pollock. Under the influence of the New York school he began to reject both his old academic subject matter and old mode of execution. In contrast to this impersonality akin to automatism, Joya’s art derives from subjective forces. In his efforts to capture and depict action in the process of painting, Joya was the first painter in the country to employ enormously large brushes for working and troweling palette knives. Gestural painting draws its sources not only from surrealism but from Asian Calligraphy as well, which places a premium on spontaneity and quick insight. Modern painting excels in flatness. Joya’s work does that, but at the same time denies it by creating a prospect of thickened textures — mysterious, promising, threatening. His pictures are an arena for this locked struggle between flatness and textured depth. Colors have a viscous consistency, no parts of the canvas were left bare, paint applied in random layers with no inner stratum of light refracting through. Like Pollock, he directly manipulates paint, also like him, he is physically in the work, transferring his energies to the emerging picture. The physicality of technique as much as the slashed skeins of pigment, were what really mattered. Intuition, free association and the painting process itself became both subject and technique right at the beginning. Form, like color, can be associative, with allusions to nature and landscape. Joya has obliterated ‘form’ as we knew it. The painting seems to break through to the ultimate abstract expression — the point at which the paint in its own right becomes more important than what it represents, so that at last the picture is exactly what it is expressed to be.