''Roma'' by Joya
18'' x 12''
Pen and Ink
1984




''Ponte Vecchio (Firenze Italia)''
18'' x 12''
Pen and Ink
1985




''Perugia''
17'' x 14''
Pen and Ink
1984

Joya's wanderlust and the romance of art and space
by Johnathan Libarios Rondina

As a young undergraduate student of what was then known as the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts, Jose T. Joya (b. June 3, 1931) spent hours in the library pouring over books on the two subject areas that would later shape and define his art – modernism and travel.  It was the early 1950’s and television had not yet been introduced to the islands.  But the young artist was a burgeoning intellectual whose talent and spirit could not be contained by insular banalities.

Despite the classical bias and hegemonic force of the Amorosolo school that fuelled the UP’s Fine Arts curriculum in those days, Joya was drawn to the dynamic and subversive power of abstract expressionism. 

In New York, the so-called “rebel artists of the 1950’s” - among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philipp Guston , Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko – were waging, and winning, the war against the aesthetic establishment. 

At the same, the young Joya was also seduced by the mystery of foreign, exotic lands.  In particular, he fantasized about spectacular Mediterranian vistas, a fantasy that would soon become a reality when, shortly after finishing his degree in 1953 with the distinction of being his alma mater’s first magna cum laude graduate in Fine Arts, he was awarded by the Spanish government with a painting grant to study in the prestigious Instituto de Cultura Hispanica in Madrid.

Those two years in Spain, from 1954 to 1955, had a profound impact on Joya’s aesthetic.  The colors and textures of the sun, sky and terrain of the Spanish southern landscape, in stark contrast to the gloom of the war-ravaged Manila of the artist’s boyhood, provided Joya with a new palette, and a predilection for vibrancy and effervescence that would become a characteristic trait throughout his career.  The landmark piece “Granadean Arabasque,” the artist’s entry to Venice Biennale in 1964, was, the by-product of Joya’s unremitting wanderlust.

In 1957, Joya received a Fulbright-Smith-Mundt scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the Cranbook Institute of Art in Michigan.  This gave him the opportunity to experiment, first-hand, with the creative force of fortuity espoused by the New York school.   While he had already eschewed the figurative much earlier in his painting career, Joya’s abstractions during this period, rendered on large canvases, began to explore the spatial realm in its use of tonal variations and geometric forms. 

This style would later evolve into more subdued, less frenzied, but no less grand compositions, as exemplified in the showcased murals “Lanterns of Enlightenment” and “Mariveles” both of which were painted in the 1970’s at the height of Joya’s career.

Joya subsequently returned to the US in the late 1960’s, on a painting grant to New York, from the Ford Foundation’s John D. Rockefeller III Fund and a printmaking scholarship to the Pratt Institute. 

As the first Filipino modern artist of international renown, Joya traversed the globe, exhibiting his works in the US, Europe, Asia and the Pacific and representing the country in prestigious biennales abroad.   As an educator who served as dean of the UP School of Fine Arts from 1970 to 1978, he was an advocate of the instructive potential of travel and organized study tours outside the country for his colleagues. When the Marcos dictatorship imposed travel restrictions outside the country under Martial Law, Joya travelled across the Philippines giving lectures on art and advocating cultural literacy.

Throughout his many journeys, and even as he succumbed to the seduction and impulse of the gestural in terms of technique and aesthetic, Joya continued to engage in the art of drawing which to him was  an indispensable skill for any visual artist regardless of philosophical proclivity. 

Indeed, as may be gleaned from the pieces in this present collection of large-scale abstracts and travel sketches,  Joya was a master at traversing the seemingly oppositional, bipolar realms of the figurative and the abstract, underscoring in the process the dynamics of symbiosis between the two.

Joya the abstractionist was manic, spirited, spontaneous.  He described painting “as the wild attempt to depict the onrushing tempo of the jet-age modernity.”

In his travel sketches we become privy to another facet of Joya’s artistic temperament - that of calm, quiet and contemplation.  In his pen and ink renderings of architectural structures from a bygone era, Joya translocates the viewer both in terms of place and time, providing a cause for reflection on the romantic possibilities between art and space.

Joya’s sketches are more than just depictions of destinations finite and terminal.  They are, at the core, narratives of multiple journeys past, of invisible characters lost and found, and of adventures-in-waiting.

We can only imagine the artist Joya, in the days before digital photography made travel and its sublime pleasures instantly forgettable, surveying the Italian landscape or a French chateau before him and considering multiple vantage points before finally setting ink to paper. 

He may have been a curiosity for the locals and they would have probably asked him questions.  In return, he would have told them of the country of his birth, its mountains, rice paddies, and glorious summers.  Journeys, after all, find fulfillment in the inevitability of return and in the promise of home.

Jose T. Joya was declared National Artist for the Visual Arts in 2003, eight years after his death, for his contribution to the indigenization of abstract art in the Philippines.  Today, his works continue to instruct and bring audiences to distant worlds.

View photos of the event here.

''Washington DC (Smithsonian)''
18'' x 12''
Pen and Ink
1978




''HongKong''
22'' x 17''
Pen and Ink
1980

''Chartres France''
18'' x 12''
Pen and Ink
1984