Joya's latest: Vaporous Quietude
Joya's latest:
Vaporous Quietude
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, August 08, 1987
ON view at the Luz Gallery until the 9th of August, Jose Joya's recent collages are like images lifted off the business end of a microscope — cellular life-forms blooming like dangerously seductive germs on plateglass slides. The maestro's use of porous handmade-paper in veiled layers provides a ready-made translucency that serves to mute or amplify his clusters of color in turn, and the feeling is like excruciatingly-slow evaporation or clouds of oil in water: chiffon-light, ponderous, restrained, rythmically expanding and contracting like irredescent blowfish, but certainly not forceful nor in any way wicked.
Make no mistake about it. These are lovely pieces almost without exception, and my wife would kill to have one in the parlor. I have no quarrel there. Artists do tend to delight in grace and quietude in their later years, and Joya's work through the ages has stopped frequently at pastoral ports of call. But the Joya I have always admired most was a masterfencer on canvas, a prima donna of the stroke and line, a matchmaker to irreconcilable opposites. And while Joya the Vaporous is nice, Joya the Magnificent was better.
Joya the Vaporous seems precious and lyrical, but Joya the Magnificent soared like a butterfly and stung like a bee. There is the world of a difference between the two. One has delicacy, the other grandeur, and Joya's self-made towering profile demands thunder from the jowls. They who demand homage crave danger, for all homage paid is satisfaction due. Isn't the maestro at least partially to blame that his most ardent fans have come to deserve what they expect? And this fan expects no less from Joya than grandeur.
The Joya of my youth was a firebrand of polished steel, a master of the chase, an apostle of the wind. The Joya of this current show of collages is scented, fragile, ephemeral. The Joya of my youth had the passion of a bull and the appetite of a shark. The Joya of the vapors likes cocoa and toast. The Joya of my youth forced the issue on stature. The Joya of spattered handmade-paper is content to bask in it.
John Coplans had said that the American painter Andy Warhol was the only real superstar to emerge from Pop Art. By the same token, Warhol's friend, Jose Joya, is the only living superstar to emerge from local abstraction. God grant him that his audacity, his energy, his appetite and his fire survive long enough to outlive him.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Joya's latest: Vaporous Quietude” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, August 08, 1987
