Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

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 a containment of forms within a pictorial space. The almost austere geometric organic abstractions have more of a compositional allover look utterly different from the Jackson Pollock — New York school ethos where he once put the Philippines in the world map. In the 1980s Joya created a kind of painting that appeared to be a regrouping of his abstract masses, a retrenchment of the sensibility in favor of order and balance, as against the almost orgiastic abandon of his abstract painting days. The autonomous rounded shapes, enough unto themselves as shapes, are founded on uniform flat colors. The new aesthetic did not sacrifice the artist’s delight in texture and paint for their own sakes. Such an ordering of details must be held to organized discipline if the abstracted subject is not to be lost in a jumble of incidental attractions. But he was as absorbed with the creation of linear rhythms as any oriental. But visually they are akin to the Filipino “kiping”. Joya exemplifies the artist who has assimilated Western influences and transformed them into his own individual style that still reflects the native Filipino hedonism and temper. Whatever the original stimulus, and irrespective of Joya’s ability to capture its phenomenal essence, the subjects of these pictures resonate and are imbued with personal feeling. The play of colors over line, of line over colors, reveals an elegiac incandescence. Whatever the sources of its inspiration, the painting is a work done at the crossroads of Jose Joya’s stylistic development.