![exhibit: The Jose Joya Retrospective
An open wound runs across one of the walls of the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). Jose Joya’s Dimensions of Fear (pictured) is a perfect rectangle that looks as if it were gouged repeatedly by dirty fingernails that left black streaks.
Raw, orange, and painful, the work is part of the biggest retrospective thus far for the National Artist for Visual Arts called “Dean,” a title that stuck even after Joya was no longer head of the College of Fine Arts (CFA) of the University of the Philippines (UP). It is a fitting term of endearment and respect since Joya was first and foremost a mentor.
Composed of over 100 works, many of them being exhibited for the first time, the CCP retrospective is part of a series of shows celebrating the artist’s 80th birth anniversary. Dubbed the “Epitome of Abstraction” by critic Alice Guillermo, Joya “eminently exemplifies the artist who has assimilated Western influences and transformed them into his own individual style that likewise reflects the native hedonism and artistic temper.”
During the opening, Joya’s sister, Josie Joya-Baldovino, said that the National Artist was a “quiet person” who took to powerful, fiery strokes as a means of venting. “When you think of ‘Joya,’ you think of abstracts that inspire you to think,” she said.
Ms. Guillermo described Joya’s style as vigorous, kinetic, and gestural. By the late 1960s, this “vividly intense” technique gave way to a “new style [that] sensitively probed shapes as though to elicit their secrets.” The difference of mood and temper is evident in Dimensions of Fear and a triptych that hangs beside it. Although done in the same scorching hues, the latter is less violent, less ferocious.
Aside from abstract canvases, curator Ana Labrador included alcoves dedicated to travel sketches, done in places such as Toledo, New York, and Washington; prints, drawings, and studies; assemblages and textures; figures and portraits; and ceramic art.
“He was a bit of a showman,” said Ms. Labrador, who remembered watching Joya complete a drawing without once lifting his pen from the paper. “He said that with one line, he could do anything.” It was through inked strokes—which zigged, zagged, and jittered—that Joya expressed his emotions.
“Before you can make abstract work with Joya’s flair and confidence, you have to be an excellent draughtsman,” pointed out Ms. Labrador. Here, then, is undeniable proof that Joya could draw.
In her curator’s notes, Ms. Labrador praised the way he “blurred the lines between portrait subjects and nudes in life drawings, imbuing in the latter an engaged personality and making them more real than detached.”
National Artist for Visual Arts Arturo Luz, who graced the opening, was astounded by the trove of representational works produced by a man hailed as a proponent of abstraction, which Joya was. “The drawings are great, period,” Mr. Luz said. “I had no idea. It’s a very pleasant surprise. Fantastic.”
Joya, Ms. Labrador explained, embodied the “creative tension” between the classicism of Fernando Amorsolo, who was dean while Joya was a student at UP-CFA, and the New York school of abstract expressionism, a movement that poured, dribbled, and flowed all over the world courtesy of Jackson Pollock.
The curator continued that Joya was able to “thrive even being betwixt, finding in the middle ground the space to produce the layered nuances of our colonial histories, art making, rituals and associations with color.”
(on view at the CCP until Nov. 6)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltylswDc4b1qz8ztfo1_400.jpg)
exhibit: The Jose Joya Retrospective
An open wound runs across one of the walls of the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). Jose Joya’s Dimensions of Fear (pictured) is a perfect rectangle that looks as if it were gouged repeatedly by dirty fingernails that left black streaks.
Raw, orange, and painful, the work is part of the biggest retrospective thus far for the National Artist for Visual Arts called “Dean,” a title that stuck even after Joya was no longer head of the College of Fine Arts (CFA) of the University of the Philippines (UP). It is a fitting term of endearment and respect since Joya was first and foremost a mentor.
Composed of over 100 works, many of them being exhibited for the first time, the CCP retrospective is part of a series of shows celebrating the artist’s 80th birth anniversary. Dubbed the “Epitome of Abstraction” by critic Alice Guillermo, Joya “eminently exemplifies the artist who has assimilated Western influences and transformed them into his own individual style that likewise reflects the native hedonism and artistic temper.”
During the opening, Joya’s sister, Josie Joya-Baldovino, said that the National Artist was a “quiet person” who took to powerful, fiery strokes as a means of venting. “When you think of ‘Joya,’ you think of abstracts that inspire you to think,” she said.
Ms. Guillermo described Joya’s style as vigorous, kinetic, and gestural. By the late 1960s, this “vividly intense” technique gave way to a “new style [that] sensitively probed shapes as though to elicit their secrets.” The difference of mood and temper is evident in Dimensions of Fear and a triptych that hangs beside it. Although done in the same scorching hues, the latter is less violent, less ferocious.
Aside from abstract canvases, curator Ana Labrador included alcoves dedicated to travel sketches, done in places such as Toledo, New York, and Washington; prints, drawings, and studies; assemblages and textures; figures and portraits; and ceramic art.
“He was a bit of a showman,” said Ms. Labrador, who remembered watching Joya complete a drawing without once lifting his pen from the paper. “He said that with one line, he could do anything.” It was through inked strokes—which zigged, zagged, and jittered—that Joya expressed his emotions.
“Before you can make abstract work with Joya’s flair and confidence, you have to be an excellent draughtsman,” pointed out Ms. Labrador. Here, then, is undeniable proof that Joya could draw.
In her curator’s notes, Ms. Labrador praised the way he “blurred the lines between portrait subjects and nudes in life drawings, imbuing in the latter an engaged personality and making them more real than detached.”
National Artist for Visual Arts Arturo Luz, who graced the opening, was astounded by the trove of representational works produced by a man hailed as a proponent of abstraction, which Joya was. “The drawings are great, period,” Mr. Luz said. “I had no idea. It’s a very pleasant surprise. Fantastic.”
Joya, Ms. Labrador explained, embodied the “creative tension” between the classicism of Fernando Amorsolo, who was dean while Joya was a student at UP-CFA, and the New York school of abstract expressionism, a movement that poured, dribbled, and flowed all over the world courtesy of Jackson Pollock.
The curator continued that Joya was able to “thrive even being betwixt, finding in the middle ground the space to produce the layered nuances of our colonial histories, art making, rituals and associations with color.”
(on view at the CCP until Nov. 6)
