A new season of Joy
The Joy Mendoza
Rojas of the past was a stressed government official and lawyer. As general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, he had a myriad of responsibilities, some of them a matter of life and death as his office’s mandate was to be of service to the less fortunate. Still a practicing lawyer, Joy Rojas attends to several heavyweight clients.
But if there is an added twinkle in his eyes (the twinkle was first put there by his wife, fellow lawyer
Trish Bunye) and a refreshing serenity in his demeanor (although I’ve always known him to be cool and collected), it’s because Joy has splashed more colors into his life.
He paints almost every day now, an hour in the morning and after work.
“I have been drawing and sketching horses since Grade 1. Painting is my expression of memories of places, in abstract colors,” he says.
Joy Rojas launches a new season in his life with his first solo show on Dec. 2 at 6 p.m. at the Saturday Group Gallery, and his choice of a name for the exhibit, Strong Material, is no surprise. It is an actual winning racehorse. Joy was once chairman of the Philippine Racing Commission. According to art critic Cid
Reyes, “As the title of the show connotes, Rojas pursues a strain of abstraction that places deliberate emphasis on the integrity of his material, in the tradition of the French
informel and matier or matter
painting, initiated by Jean
Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier and Georges Mathieu. Diverging from abstraction’s dependence on pure automatism and gestural brush marks, Rojas opted for the exploration of texture through the use of heavy impastos, applied in vigorous layers to achieve a tactile quality.”
“The result,” continues Cid, “is an expressive visual statement with meanings that have been coaxed out of the rich and rough terrain of primal matter. Each work is reflective of the artist’s state of mind and emotion, awakened in him by personal memories.”
Joy says, “The act of painting brings me to a placid state where memories of good things are made tangible on canvas. One of my paintings, which is colored copper, is a memory of the foliage when I was in college in Massachusetts. My other painting, which has golden hues, is a canvas of my vivid memories of St. Petersburg’s stately ornamentations. Some paintings with names of my horses are abstracts of their elegant form and movement.”
His turning to painting as a hobby, and now, a serious occupation, was in a way inspired by his late ninang, former President Cory
Aquino. Cory also turned to painting after her retirement from government, and she was a prolific painter with an unmistakable style.
“I see every day the painting she gave my wife and me as her wedding gift. It was also an inspiration,” says Joy, though he and his ninang have very different styles.
But what is certain is that painting has brought out an erstwhile hidden talent in both of them.
For Joy, it is never too late to pick up a brush and behold a new season in one’s life — in vivid colors. Strong Material runs until Dec. 8.