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No other work by José Joya has been more talked and written about, iconized, and celebrated, as well as exhibited in museums both in the Philippines and abroad than the magnificent “Space Transfiguration". Acclaimed and accorded a prize at the 12th Art Association of the Philippines’ Annual Exhibition and Competition of 1959, it was Joya’s most favorite piece and the one work he refused to part with. It was passed on to his beloved sister Josie J. Baldovino, keeper of his artistic flame and his staunchest supporter throughout his entire career. Ms. Baldovino recounts that it could not be included in Joya’s triumphant participation at the 1962 Venice Biennale for the simple but piquant reason that it was too large to be accommodated through the airplane’s doors. Indeed, Joya’s experimentation with larger-scale paintings are said to have begun with “Space Transfiguration”, as suggested by the sage art critic Alice Guillermo. The work’s title suggests this ample size. It’s hard to believe — as National Artist Francisco Arcellana pointed out — that José Joya was all of 29 years old when he created this extraordinary work. Joya had just returned from a 2-year study in the United States where he would come face-to-face with abstract Expressionism. In 3 years he would be the representative at the Philippines’ first ever participation in the world’s oldest art fair in Venice. And in another 5, he would also be the country's first grantee of the Asian Cultural Council, through its precursor, the Ford Foundation. It is entirely fitting that this remarkable work of art should be a highlight at the much-awaited ACC Auction. (LGN) No other Filipino painter has used paint as massively and texturally as Joya. They emphasized the materiality of the oil medium through skeins of paint dribbled all over the canvas surface and gobs of pigment slashed across it. The loose gestural brushstrokes underscored the kinetic act of painting. The orientation of the massed gestural strokes creates an asymmetry that approximates the power of the brushstrokes, invigorating and charging the surrounding space with energy. Gesture is very important in this kind of painting. The movement of the hand across the canvas, as in spontaneous writing or calligraphy for its own sake, is vital. Instead of an idea being perfect and depicted what the artist feels at the moment of creation is paramount and should be communicated in an abstract fashion through the hand. However, the color intensities and the textures remain. A close examination of the calligraphic brushwork in Space Transfiguration shows that it is similar to the Saetas of Fernando Zobel. However, Joya could not identify himself with painting black on white starkly. Being a colorist, Joya chose to use shades like red and earthier colors. Joya’s storied foray into the non-figurative is long and deep. In December 1953, Jose Joya dispensed with figurative references altogether in his entries for the group show of 11 Modernists at the Philippine Art Gallery run by Lydia Arguilla. Referred to as the First Exhibition of Philippine Non-objective Art in Tagala, the show, curated by Aurelio Alvero a.k.a. Magtanggol Asa, had, as participants Hernando R. Ocampo, Fernando Zobel, Nena Saguil, Fidel de Castro, Conrado V. Pedroche, Lee Aguinaldo, Leandro Locsin, Carl Steele, Victor Oteyza, Manuel Rodriguez Sr, and Jose Joya himself. His 2 entries for the show, Something and Composition in Red, signaled the beginning of his career as a major exponent of abstraction in the country. Joya’s further identification with the style of international abstractionism in art was the result of his studies in America in the latter 50s, at a time when he was most impressionable because young and just out of school, in spite of a somewhat numbing experience in Spain (it was his first trip to Europe), in 1954 and 1955, during which he could hardly paint in that Iberian milieu. In 1957, Joya went to the United States for further studies. He was exposed to the abstract Expressionist movement as it was becoming an establishment there. At the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the late 1950s, Joya was so obsessed with gestural lines that he did a number of inkwash drawings with the use of twigs, in order to liberate himself from the academic training at the University of the Philippines. Joya also fell under the influence of his mentor, Zoltan Sepeshy. Sepeshy was a firm believer in this aesthetic. The US study grant included a period of orientation in New York, where he underwent a massive exposure to the work of the abstract Expressionists. Only after his exposure to the New York School of De Kooning, Pollock, Kline et al. in the mid 50s did Joya begin to evolve the style by which he has been classified as a serious painter. The works of his post-Detroit years were bold statements eliminating subject matter altogether in favor of purely plastic means to create large, loose forms whose “meaning” was arrived at by psychological associations. His concern has since been to create painterly accidents of the kind that allow deeply buried personal meanings to take on visibility. Joya’s Space Transfiguration is turbulent, full of motion, color, and emotion. Within the context of Philippine art, Joya pioneered the technique of trowelling pigment onto his canvases. By this time he had begun to demonstrate his genius for rendering surface textures and capturing emotional immediacy. Within the endless flexibility of the oil medium, Joya achieves impasto effects in the areas of most concentrated attention. Joya’s abstract Expressionist reputation — of New York school — will further be based on his participation in the 32nd Venice Biennial in 1964, for which he had painted very large works in thick paint applied in semi-automatist manner. Art critic Eric Torres described such works as excessive not so much of statements as of states of feeling. Space Transfiguration could very well have been the archetypal painting for some of them. Space Transfiguration shows the great freedom depicted in a storm of brushstrokes of vivid, violent colors with which Joya was handling paint — a freedom which long after his death, continues to liberate Philippine painting towards the end of the 20th century.