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Nace en Inglaterra en 1923. De 1946 a 1956 vivió en Canadá y desde 1956 se estableció en México. A partir de 1966 ha expuesto individualmente, a nivel nacional en: Guanajuato, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Villahermosa, Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Sn. Miguel Allende, Cuernavaca y la Cdad. de México. Internacionalmente en: NY, Nuevo Orleans, Dallas, Washington, Toronto, París, Londres y Barcelona. Su obra se encuentra en diversas colecciones como: El Museo de Dallas, Tx. US, el National Museum of Women in the arts (Washington, DC), el Banco Nal. de México, El Banco de Comercio (Mex), la Esso Oil of Canada, Grupo Resistol (Mex), El Museo de Arte Moderno (Mex), El Museo de Monterrey (NL, Mex) y Aerovías de Mex. Recibió el Premio de Adquisición por el Palacio de Bellas Artes en Confrontación '66.
Joy Laville
Time Suspended
Author: Salomon Grimberg
ArtNexus No. 57 - Jun 2005
The simplicity of Laville?s work is deceptive. She struggles to reduce her painting to its essence, searching for the image that will ?read? like poetry. This desire for visual synthesis has led her to study African, Chinese, Cycladic, Etruscan, Minoan, and Olmec objects and art.
During the spring of 2004, Joy Laville was honored with a retrospective exhibition at Mexico City?s Museo de Arte Moderno. Her evocative work?reflective memory suspended in time?belies its depth. Leonora Carrington refers to it with admiration as ?a fingerprint? because it is unique.
Hélène Joy Laville was born on September 8, 1923 in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, England, the child of Vera Perren, a singer, and Francis Laville, a captain in the Indian Army of the Seventh Rajput Regiment. Joy was a sensitive, happy child with a budding talent: she could draw, which she continued to do long after most children stop. By the time she was twelve years old a print of a Cezanne still life hung in her bedroom. Although her parents discouraged her artistic ambitions, she took independent art courses while finishing high school and briefly attending a small business school. Her education was cut short when World War II broke out. At twenty-one she married, and two years later moved to Canada where her son Trevor was born in 1951. It was there that Joy Laville discovered Diego Rivera and Mexican art.
Ready to leave her marriage, Laville contacted the Mexican consul in Vancouver to obtain travel permits and on June 3, 1956, she and Trevor flew to Mexico City, in an intent on remaining there. Three days later, they arrived by train in San Miguel de Allende, where, for the next two years she undertook her only formal art training at the Instituto Allende with James Pinto. She experimented with a variety of styles from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, and was also influenced by Roger von Gunten, a Swiss expatriate artist. To help with expenses, she worked part-time in the office at the Instituto.
In 1960, Laville sold her first painting for 50 pesos: a head of Christ that was strongly reminiscent of Odilon Redon?s Closed Eyes; she signed it ?Rowe,? her married name. That same year, with a box of pastels and paper that a student left behind she completed a landscape of San Miguel in the style that is now recognized as her own ?fingerprint? iconography. Other landscapes as well as interiors in the new style followed. Gradually, Laville introduced the human figure?she had always drawn nudes?and occasionally added flower forms to complement the compositions. In 1964 while working part-time in the bookstore El Colibrí, Laville met the Mexican author Jorge Ibargüengoitia, her future husband.
In 1966, the Galería Pecanins in Mexico City exhibited Laville?s paintings, earning the admiration of critics and collectors. She also won the Confrontación 66 competition and an acquisition prize from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. The following year Ibargüengoitia introduced her to Inés Amor, director of the Galería de Arte Mexicano, and Laville began showing there. (She became a common denominator among other artists in the gallery, for regardless of their own styles of painting, each genuinely admired her work.)
Joy Laville feels great admiration for works of the past by Fra Angelico, Breughel, Filippo Lippi, Goya (especially a head of a dog from his Black Paintings), and Velázquez. Numerous familiar images or details of modern artists can be detected in her work?the sultry odalisques of Delacroix or Matisse, Marie Laurencin?s nearly faceless women, or David Hockney?s clever use of space. Oddly, it is pure coincidence that some of the flower pastels appear so close in spirit to the symbolist work of Redon. The painter Gunther Gerzso said of her work: ?Her paintings are composed as carefully as Matisse?s: you cannot move anything because the whole composition falls apart.?
Before Laville met Ibargüengoitia, her nudes?almost always self-portraits?were small, rather insignificant elements used to complement an arrangement. Afterward, the figures became larger and assumed a new assertiveness. In 1967, following an exhibition of pastel drawings at Galería de Arte Mexicano and at Inés Amor?s suggestion, Laville broadened her range of expression, exploring the use of oils, acrylics, and watercolors; she also worked with graphics?etching, lithography, and silkscreen?and in three dimensions (bronze sculpture). She made illustrations for various publications, including children?s books, and eventually did all the covers for Ibargüengoitia?s books.
In 1970, the tone and emotional content of Laville?s painting changed dramatically. Still retaining her signature subtlety, she began to produce imposing images. These are ravishing works such as Reclining Nude with Mountain View, 1970, and two large versions of the Landscape of San Miguel, both of 1970, one of which curator Fernando Gamboa eagerly acquired for the Banco Nacional de México?s permanent collection. Another was Youth, 1970, where the figure blends languidly and inconspicuously with a landscape of green-gray hills. Laville has continued in that vein, creating monumental images, though with the same intimacy as the earlier smaller works. The first painting Laville gave Ibargüengoitia was a pastel of gray and yellow flowers. Though he treasured it, he later warned her: ?Make sure you are not known as a painter of flowers.? There was no danger of that. Joy Laville is a painter of spirit; affectively her work is right. The flowers, like the landscapes and nudes she creates and rearranges in endless compositions are merely vehicles used to convey unity within time and space.
Laville and Ibargüengoitia traveled constantly, visiting Africa, Egypt, Greece, and Spain, as well as Baja California, Mazatlán, and the Sea of Cortés. Wherever they went, both worked. Each new environment effected radical changes in Laville?s painting. Her pastel palette shifted according to the light or mood of each new environment becoming richer, lighter, cooler, or more intense. In Roquetas del Mar in Almería, Laville created portraits of sultry women, some wearing see-through chemises with only their pubic hair barely visible, and dream-like images and evocative seascapes that may be among the more mysterious works that ever emerged from her brushes.
In one self-portrait created in Egypt, Laville portrayed herself traveling in a boat on the Nile, while a pink alligator sleeps lazily on the banks. An amusing double portrait, painted like a composite postcard, shows Laville and Ibargüengoitia surrounded by references to their travels: airplanes, pyramids, and suggestions of Karnak, Luxor, and Aswan. In a third work, Laville transforms the Sphinx into a luscious green and black-maned lion. Recalling a photographic safari to Mombasa, the color orange heats the paintings of Amboseli?s dry land. Arid, rocky landscapes painted in Greece are gray and monochromatic, although some of Hydra reveal an element of surprise: a single tree in the distance, or a bus climbing a steep hill, nearly blending into the landscape. In Baja California her work took on an extraordinary dimension; she painted swimmers floating in vast oceans, alone, or in groups like schools of whales, and gliders suspended over mountains or boundless seascapes.
For a time, in the early 1970?s, Laville was influenced by photography. Some of E.J. Bellocq?s girls from the New Orleans red-light district reappear in Laville?s compositions. Laville also recreated Diane Arbus?s circus performer several times, one version of which illustrated the cover of Ibargüengoitia?s book The Dead Girls.
After Laville?s first retrospective exhibition, in 1977 at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Ibargüengoitia was offered a teaching position at Rutgers University; they moved to New Jersey in 1978. The following year the couple went to Europe, visiting Holland and Austria and settling in a Paris apartment where each had a separate studio. Laville continued to exhibit in Mexico, as well as in the United States and Canada.
In 1982, Laville painted two Annunciations in which a woman simultaneously sits inside and outside of a room. She is eyeless, with arms crossed (in the first version of the painting she holds a cat), and an airplane approaches overhead. The subject might be interpreted as a parody of a religious allegory, or even as erotic had it not been that on November 27, 1983 at 1:04 a.m., Jorge Ibargüengoitia was killed in an airplane crash above Corral de Jorge, just outside Madrid. He was traveling with three other Latin American authors, Angel Rama, Manuel Scorza, and Martha Traba, who were en route to Bogotá, Colombia, as guests of Gabriel García Márquez?s Primer Encuentro de Cultura Hispanoamericana.
When she began to paint again, the emotional content of her work, usually hermetic, became readily accessible. If hung side by side, the paintings of this period would silently narrate a love story. In the first work she produced, Woman with Flowers and Plane, 1984, Laville is staring vacantly, one-eyed, alone in a deserted landscape embracing a bouquet of flowers, an airplane crashing behind her. This iconography would pursue Laville for years, much like the Furies pursued Orestes. Sleeping Woman and Plane, 1984, completed the same year, depicts Laville on the night of her husband?s death, asleep in their Paris apartment as an airplane crashes overhead. Again she portrays herself as small, now emphasizing her aloneness and her loss.
Eventually, much as the airplane symbolized the trauma, a boat came to symbolize his departure and a river replaced the ocean. Several works draw on the theme of Joachim Patinir?s painting of Charon Crossing the Styx River, c.1510, Prado Museum, in which the boatman is transporting a dead man?s soul across the water to the next world. The water separating the two worlds insinuates an implacable solitude. Laville first portrayed Ibargüengoitia?s parting in Man Jumping Off a Rock, 1986, where he is portrayed jumping into the water, where a boat awaits. A version of this image became the cover for a book of his essays, Sálvese Quien Pueda. Variations on this theme recurred in several paintings, including A Man Leaving on a Boat, 1986, or Man Discovering a Temple, 1987. In others, like the two versions of The River, 1984, he has entered a new realm, which she is not allowed to see.
More recent self-portraits indicate that Laville is whole again. She no longer portrays herself as stunned, angry, or desperate, but rather she is clear, contemplative, and in balance. References to Ibargüengoitia are less frequent, in works that are at times sad or nostalgic, other times tender, even hopeful. His presence may be seen or sensed in some self-portraits, still lifes, or sea- or landscapes.
The simplicity of Laville?s work is deceptive. She struggles to reduce her painting to its essence, searching for the image that will ?read? like poetry. This desire for visual synthesis has led her to study African, Chinese, Cycladic, Etruscan, Minoan, and Olmec objects and art. Fresh imagery continues to emerge, and she admits that some of her favorite works are more recent ones, like ?a big landscape with lots of palm trees,? but in the next breath, Laville will add, ?I like to look at things I did many years ago and see how good I used to be.?
The ocean remains for Laville a symbol of the unknown. In Coming Up for Air, 1991, three water sprites rise to the surface, far away from shore. In Bride on the Beach, 1993, a young woman, her face veiled, waits to embark on the boat that will take her to her husband-to-be. For two recent solo shows in New York, in 1993 and 1995, she exhibited strong images derived from poet John Keats?s tale of the femme fatale, La Belle Dame sans Merci, although the iconography is pure Laville. In the original poem, the seductress uses her long hair as weapon to suffocate her victim by winding it around his neck. In Laville?s version, the sea takes his last breath.
One might never guess that Laville?s serene images are generated by disquiet; only careful contemplation of the image delivers the emotion they hold within. She imbues each personage, still life, landscape or interior with a form of temperance that conveys tension and also keeps them interesting and gives them presence. Even her portraits reveal more about the sitters than simply their outward appearance.
In 1985, Joy Laville returned to Jiutepec, Mexico, not far from Cuernavaca. Walking into her house is a singular experience, much like entering one of her paintings. The interior is unassuming, spacious and sparse, with simple furniture in quiet colors, a plant here and there. Her paintings hanging on the walls look like windows that open into other rooms, into Laville?s many worlds.
Laville is vulnerable, perhaps, but not fragile. She works zealously and has presented twenty-one individual shows in twenty years, in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. Last year?s retrospective exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno, curated by Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, brought together works from more than four decades and represented Joy Laville?s unique and continuing contribution to contemporary Mexican art.
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