Juvenal Sansó: A Global Artist

 

Award-winning artist Juvenal Sansó and his art have circumnavigated the world on the path to fame and honor. Beginning with his first solo art exhibit some five decades ago, Sansó has showcased his artworks in Great Britain, Mexico, Italy, Spain, and the United States. These are just a few of the international settings where art lovers and connoisseurs have had the pleasure of being enchanted by Sansó’s luminescently colorful and naturalistic scenes as well as by the austere imagery of his printmaking.  

But no where is Sansó more appreciated than he is in the Philippines, the land this extraordinary artist has called home since the time he was five. Sansó, who was born in Reus, Catalonia, Spain in 1929, learned much of his craft at the University of the Philippines’s School of Fine Arts. 

As a young art student, he was mentored at the school by such prominent artists as Fernando Amorsolo and Ireneo Miranda. Sansó was rewarded for his diligent studying at the University of the Philippines with the successful launch of his first solo exhibit in 1957 at the Philippine Art Gallery.  

If any artist has become a global ambassador for some of the finest of what Philippine art has to offer, it is Juvenal Sansó. Aside from his countless exhibitions abroad, Sansó has made quite an impression with his art in the minds of famous and influential personalities. Over the years, several of Sansó’s works have found their way into the collections of such public figures as French film director Jean Cocteau, Nelson E. Rockefeller, the actor Vincent Price, Thailand’s Princess Chumbhot, and Baroness Edouard de Rothschild.

As far as institutions go, Sansó’s works are nestled in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Paris’s Musée d'Art Moderne, the Smithsonian Institution, and in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid. In the Philippines, the collections of business tycoon Henry Sy, the Lopez Foundation, and Fernando Zóbel de Ayala are where many of Sansó’s productions reside.  

What is it about Juvenal Sansó’s art that makes it so exceptional and appealing? If you ask Sansó himself, he would say that composition makes all the difference in ascertaining the quality of an artwork. Sansó concentrates a great deal of energy on organizing a painting’s contours, content, flow, color, and lighting, thereby giving his viewers a well-ordered and yet distinct and exquisite compilation of images. Some critics, in praising Sansó, have focused on his imaginative usage of color, while others prefer to belabor other aspects of his works like his themes or techniques.  

There is no single facet of Sansó’s art that emerges above the others. Composition, color, style, motif, etc. all work together to produce material that is alluring, chimerical, and protean. In the case of his so-called “Black Period,” Sansó presents audiences with somber, nuanced prints that not only generate feelings of melancholy and isolation—feelings fueled in part by the artist’s depressing memories of World War Two—but that also blend dream and reality together into a surrealistic whole. 

In Sansó’s “Black Bouquet” prints like “Moonglow”, “Arbuste”, and “Baklad”, composed between 1955 and 1968, blackened imagery dominates the compositions, leaving nothing in the way of comfort or of the idyllic. 

This motif of dusky emotionality and inornate tones however, underwent a steady transition to one where more expressive coloring and radiant lighting would course through Sansó’s paintings. This is beautifully manifested in the artist’s “Summer” collection of acrylic paintings. Sansó got many of his ideas for the collection during his summertime escapes to the French coastal province of Brittany where he communed with nature and developed a love for that time of the year which, as Sansó puts it, evokes an interlude “of plenty, of maturity, of fruitful completeness.”  

Out of the “Summer” collection has come Sansó’s latest exhibition of art, titled “Water: The Medium”. The water element has governed Sansó’s dreams and imagination ever since he was a little boy. Sansó’s artistic sensibility was further galvanized in the Philippines where water is an omnipresent geographical theme. Manila's Pasig River in particular, had a captivating effect on Sansó’s water imagery. As he reminisced in a 2007 article, the Pasig’s “dazzling reflections,” as they were illuminated by the Manila sunsets of his childhood, “truly delighted the senses of the fluvial ferment in a child’s mind and nourished a future painter’s eyes.” Indeed, “the river still induces dreamlike visions of idyllic retreats into a personal realm.”  

After many years of traveling abroad, Sansó has finally returned to the Philippines for good. The best part about this is that he has found his artistic inspiration in the Philippines to be just as bountiful as it was overseas. There is much to be said for the artist as a homecoming hero.

ALLEN GABORRO