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PROPERTY FROM THE DON EUGENIO “GENY” LOPEZ JR. COLLECTION Yellow Abode signed and dated 1961 (lower right) oil on canvas 32" x 32" (81 cm x 81 cm) Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mr. Alexander Richard Joya Baldovino confirming the authenticity of this lot PROVENANCE: The Luz Gallery Finale Art File EXHIBITED: The Luz Gallery, Christmas Group Show, Manila, December 22, 1961 - January 6, 1962 WRITE UP: The very surname of Jose Joya denotes “jewel”—a crowning gem in the annals of Philippine art. Joya’s success is attested by his many accomplishments throughout every decade of his career. He triumphantly closed his formative years of the 1950s when he won the First Prize for Non-Objective Painting at the 1958 Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Annual Competition and Exhibition and the Second Prize at the 1959 Annual for his now-iconic work Space Transfiguration. With the dawn of the 1960s, Joya’s success only went from strength to strength, constantly flexing his creative virtuoso. And it is in that festive atmosphere that Joya created this spirited work titled Yellow Abode. Yellow Abode is a valuable memento from the same prolific year when Joya was granted two of his most important awards in his lifetime: the Republic Cultural Heritage Award, precursor to the National Artist Award (he was awarded the latter posthumously in 2003) and the Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award. Writes Ileana Maramag in her article “Top Young Men of 1961 Named”: “Joya was selected for his accomplishments as the leading young (30) non-objective artist in the country today. An exponent of non-figurative art in the Philippines, his works have consistently won prizes too lengthy to list. Earlier this year, he won the Republic Cultural Heritage Award.” Yellow Abode is characterized by turbulent, dynamic strokes and rich slabs of impastos, much like the painter who had then become wealthy in accomplishments. The piece was among the works included in a Christmas group exhibition at the Luz Gallery that formed part of the first anniversary celebrations of Arturo Luz’s brainchild (The Luz Gallery celebrated its first anniversary on December 4, 1961). The onset of the 1960s can be seen as a budding climax, starting from Joya’s formative years of the 1950s to being a champion of a lyrical type of abstract expressionism characterized by a dynamic oriental sensibility. Joya’s Cranbrook period from 1956-57 unleashed his abstract expressionist powers; he would abandon any traces of representation in his paintings. A quick investigation of Joya’s works during this period would reveal the artist’s earliest explorations of abstract expressionism. “It was only during the late 1950s or early ‘60s that I started doing these Abstract Expressionist paintings,” Joya said to Cid Reyes in a September 1973 interview and published in the latter’s Conversations on Philippine Art. “From the American abstractionists [Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, and Motherwall], I learned spontaneity and energy, the dynamic approach to abstraction.” At Cranbrook, away from the confines of academicism espoused by his alma mater, the UP School of Fine Arts, Joya sketched everything he saw. Eventually, he would yield to nature’s “magic” and use twigs soaked in ink in his sketches. This discovery gave Joya a creative power so surreal that his imagination and emotions seemingly ran unbridled from within. This was the birth of Joya’s abstract expressionist finesse. Although then living in the Occident, this discovery in Joya was undoubtedly Oriental in sensibility, for Abstract Expressionism traces its roots in the spontaneous calligraphic drawing found in ancient Chinese scroll painting and its sublime oneness with nature’s dynamic forces and elements that drew Joya in. Even Joya himself admitted in the Reyes interview that calligraphy has always played “a very extensive” role in his paintings; a single calligraphic stroke results in an inner landscape of the mind, born from nature and one with nature. With paint applied in spontaneous, calligraphic-like slashes, Yellow Abode epitomizes Joya’s embrace of that oriental sensibility. There is a central core, characterized by invigorated impastos, from which the painting derives energy. Joya states this is “a strong sense of oriental occult balance” or asymmetrical balance. From the central core of heavy impastos, slabs, streaks, and strokes of paint project themselves, evoking a strong sense of movement and thus creating dynamic balance. As with the subject of Yellow Abode, Joya depicts not the physicality of the titular “abode” but its essence. It is an “abode” in the spiritual sense in which solid swathes of yellows, the imperial color of prosperity in oriental culture, signify an endless source of power. As “abode” is defined as a place of dwelling from a denotational viewpoint, Joya’s Yellow Abode sublimely expresses a place of dynamic contemplation; a reinvigorating haven for rest and calm; a return to his oriental roots. Art critic Leonidas Benesa, writing in the book Joya: Drawings, notes that Joya practiced this “oriental occult balance” in the years immediately preceding and succeeding the 1964 Venice Biennale, considered the apex of Joya’s career. “A landscape in the Chinese artist’s way,” characterized by wedding observation with developing “an unconscious feeling” for the “rise and fall of the visual motion…the socalled breathing spaces of Chinese calligraphic art,” as Benesa puts it. This “oriental occult balance” in Joya’s artistic praxis would signify his transition into pure, lyrical painting centered on the dynamics of the inner mind, a retreat into an abode of enlivening meditation and self-expression. Thus, Yellow Abode is both a reminder of Joya further honing his creative muscle and what’s yet to come in his career. Much like Yellow Abode, Joya would become an abode himself—a wellspring of creative power, a powerhouse of Philippine art. (Adrian Maranan)