To begin writing about Juvenal Sanso one would normally start describing him as an “internationally-renowned” artist. What this means is clear to many of the three or four generations who knew Sanso.
This November Sanso will be turning 81, a milestone not only in his age but also in the age of his fans who are now literally from “1 to 92,” just like Sinatra’s famous Christmas Song. Among this recent generation of fans includes me. No, I was not a fan at age of one but rather around the time I started to draw, which is kind of late.
While we look up to developments in contemporary art and try to surpass what others before us have done by trying to continue with a presumed artistic tradition one can’t help but look back and marvel at what masters like Sanso did and think that they are unbeatable.
For who else can live as long, paint as much and be admired by so many?
Artists in Sanso’s generation are noteworthy for their toughness. Many of them are artists-intellectuals. I find their writings, including Sanso’s own some of the most meaningful texts not only in the study of art but also of human nature in general. Sanso relates pretty complicated concepts in art to just about any of your average philistine while going ahead in pushing the limits of what can be seen in a certain subject matter. I believe that of all the elements, color is the strongest in a Sanso painting, for it is in this element that we see his being Filipino.
When I finally sat down and tried to write about him, I was cautioned that I may be in danger of spilling too many textbook explanations of his works. Essentially though, one can tell a lot just by observing his use color.
I realize that we may be in danger of just being the opposite, the artist who knows no public except their small coterie, the one who works not within the boundaries but above it, realizing that without these boundaries we are unnecessarily leaving behind the public in order to catch up to the tune of the Pied Piper.
I was initiated to works of Sanso through my father who is neither an art collector, a critic or an artist. When my father chanced upon one of his exhibitions in a hotel in Manila he could not stop marveling at his works. And I marvel at the fact that he’s marveling at them. A guy like my father rarely talks about art. He has only another one story involving art and it is about a lost opportunity to buy a Joya Painting for a thousand pesos in the 70s.
But that’s another story, but that’s one proof to say that I knew Juvenal Sanso or his name and reputation even then, often recalling that character from Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote who sounded like his surname, Sancho (as I found out later, the Sansos are actually a family of knights). The first paintings I saw of Sanso are in glossy catalogs I flipped through in compendiums authored by Manuel Duldulao in Art Philippines and Alejandro Roces in a seminal volume simply titled “Sanso”. I recall a few of his paintings which I had a liking from the start, although not in the major major way until recently when I actually saw them in person.
Let me digress for a little bit and tell you about the story when I had the opportunity to cross paths with Sanso. It happened in a rather funny way two years ago. It was in a group exhibition that I organized at an art gallery in SM Megamall and Sanso happened to pass by the gallery. He was actually going to another exhibition at another gallery but seeing that we had an opening too, he stopped for a while and recognized some of his friends who were also our guests. I didn’t mind him, I mean I was starstrucked at first so I can’t seem to know what to do with a famous person suddenly arriving in your party. It’s like having your classroom invaded by the Eraserheads.
After a few minutes he went out to attend to his original purpose but maybe after about a few hours he came back and looked at our paintings again in passing through the glass walls, unmindful that there was a wire right in front of him. The old man tripped and tried to look around and see if anyone saw him. I came to help him get up (he already managed to do so by himself) and introduce myself. Realizing that there was a witness to what happened, he shrugged the thing away and smiled. I offered him cocktails but he declined. He said he already ate some before we arrived but that our paintings were beautiful and he was pleased with it. Saying praises with eyes gleaming and a smile that revealed his younger “juvenal” self, it was nothing short of surreal.
In fact, I can’t think of a better way to compliment months of hardwork than a few kind words from the likes of him. Considering that he just happened to pass by and what he just recently went through (ahem!) he could have been irritated or brash but he was genuine and encouraging even.
Months later while I was organizing a nude sketching session to fund an exhibition, I tried to contact Juvenal Sanso who I assume still remembers me from that funny incident during which he sort of told me to remind him if we had any other openings. I took that as a permission to contact him. But flattery makes me abash, so I asked Caroline to call him instead and ask if he can give the annual art talk in UP and sketch with us. His first reply was not favorable and we can blame that naturally to his age which he said in jest “I’m through with nudes, it doesn’t excite me anymore.” We took it well, understanding that it would be doubly hard for him with a schedule like that (he had just finished a stage design and set-up in Aurora province) and the hassle of going to UP Fine Arts from his home in Bel-Air, Makati. But he kept on talking, something which Caroline thought was a gentleman’s courtesy to a young student.
Little did we know that Sanso was more interested to break his schedule and go through the same hassle if he can say his piece about the recent fiasco over the order of the Order of the National Artists which was a hot topic at that time. He went on and on talking about it and asking what our opinion as art students were. He remarked that he did not want to sit at the committee that selected for it anymore if that was going to be the case from now on. With his fiery statements, it is interesting to note that former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is among her patrons. But a great man like him has no reason to hold back his strong opinions about anything. Just months prior, the same president recognized him with the Presidential Medal of Merit, an honor she also bestowed to the likes of Carlo J. Caparas.
In UP, Sanso was classmates with Pitoy Moreno who were among the last to enter the School of Fine arts at the Padre Faura Campus. A photo of them together with some girls (beautiful ones who by now are probably grandmothers) is among the treasured items in the collection of the UP Library.
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What Sanso is like beyond worlds I know—beyond Manila and UP, I can only imagine. One only needs to browse through his website here and would immediately feel a smallness before a Titan. Sanso and his paintings seem to be larger than life not because they are priced royally as fit for the purple-blooded artist but because they present the ideal of an artist whose dedication to craft is an understatement to be called great. He surpassed contemporaries and continued to contest challenges with tons of hardwork and a helping of luck.
In “Sansó: A Show of Shows” which opened a year ago at the Sapphire Ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental Suites in Cubao, I had the opportunity to finally see his paintings in such volume and intensity. By golly! I was kilig to the bones by the mere thought.
Exhibitions like these present themselves not only as a tribute to the artist but an opportunity to study and scrutinize them, including the way he and his legacy of paintings are being represented today. In this day and age Sanso remains to be case and object of study especially for local critics and historians who would want to examine him as part of a larger phenomenon, perhaps something that would contribute to the identity of Philippine Art. For the explainer like me whose attempt is to root out just about everything, the primary concern is uncovering apparatus behind the “international-renown” which we easily refer to his being born in Spain, living mostly in the Philippines and being currently based in Paris. International-renown could also mean, being claimed by many countries as their own. Which brings me to a point, why isn’t he awarded the citizenship? I heard that the only reason why he has maintained citizenship solely somewhere else is because his application for naturalization as a Filipino was always denied due to politics (Zulueta).
Other than his overdue citizenship, Sanso is, just like in the hearts of ordinary art-loving people like my father. He is in some imagination, a painter of that (essentially) belongs to this nation.
I see the issue in Spain claiming Sanso and Zobel but not Luna and Hidalgo, artists almost only half a century apart. But even if Spain did claim Filipino art as Spanish Art as they have claimed Latin American Art to some extent, it would be to no amount. Since the validating locus has shifted from Europe to the US after the war and in the advent of free-market and globalization that saw an imminent dispersal of centers the propagation of national art and culture ceased and reversed, the dispersal of centers also meant a further suppression of the local in favor of the regional. And If Filipino Art is to survive it would be subsumed by labels such as Southeast Asian Art or the much hyped label, Asian Art. Remember that label “world music” which in large part referred to African and Asian instruments? I guess that would be the case.
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Sanso is international in two ways, first by birth and second by accomplishment. He was destined from the very beginning to not become the basic, normal painter of flowers (when he did paint flowers it always seemed to be much more than just beautiful). Later in life he would recall that his artistic development was heavily influenced by the journey and transformation he underwent as a child. In an essay entitled “Water: the medium” accessed through his website, Sanso talks about this.
The next encounter with water was a long trip by boat from Barcelona to Manila. It figured as a major event in my life because for forty days and nights I was awakened to the vastness and infiniteness of the sea aboard the Norwegian steamship, Torrens.
Being an archipelago, the Philippines added more places to my experience of water. Water was everywhere. In Manila, we had a house right beside the Pasig River where I had some mighty adventures as a tireless child . . . “malikot na malikot daw ako.” It was there in the Pasig where I learned to swim, even saving two little girls from drowning. (Sanso by Sanso)
One can only imagine what Manila looked liked in those days. Its waters its lights and its darkness must have ingrained something so profound for him which inspired him to pursue art in such a way. Art says Robert Henri in the “Art Spirit” is in many ways the sublimated expression of a collected experience of the adult about his childhood. Sanso’s earliest memories are here in the Philippines while his recollections of Catalonia in pictures of his family are hardly experiences. His family fled Spain in 1934 when civil war was lurking and Spaniards had a flair for nostalgia for the former colony. What they escaped in Spain they would later confront years later when World War II erupted.
Sanso suffered injuries and would have likely been dead found amongst the rubbles of their bombed down Sta. Ana home if not for a complete stranger Filipino who saved him. (he narrated this same story to Caroline when she called him up to invite him for the art talk). Would you believe that Sanso became a bus conductor during the war?
Enrolling as a special student at UP he studied under Fernando Amorsolo. He later attended UST.
Sanso’s early paintings from the 40s and 50s featured in some of the works from the last exposition I visited, though elegant and beautiful in a structured execution are still your standard painting plates which do not exactly stand-out. While the period in art is an energetic one, the prevailing practice of classicism continued well into the early 50s. The transition to maturity would be delayed by another decade as the nation was rising from ruin. This would rapidly change when Joya and Abueva return from abroad to become junior faculty to Tolentino and Amorsolo and when the moderns gain more critical acclaim to take the art scene full-throttle. This lull, so called UP’s “Age of Innocence” when students contented themselves with hayrides and carnivals would reflect much on the kind of art being produced in the university. One can see the trace in the figure in Sanso, even if just an accidental sweep or brushstroke that gives away the tendency and personality of the artist who did it. It was a man who is by nature light and easy but consistent and sometimes playful but always with a purpose, in his own term “makulit”. You do not contain Sanso in a movement. I do not agree with the phrase “Pioneer of Expressionism,” accorded to him by some. If by expressionism you mean the movement, Sanso is off by an entire half a century and off-centered by a few borderlines from Germany. If referring to expressionism in the country, the first one who did were forgotten or obscured in the 20s. What Sanso is, no one can really tell what. To package him in such glossy terms is an ignorant folly. He fits none of the clichés and none of the clichés fit him.
By his use of well-loved painting subjects, the seascape and the flower, I can say that Sanso’s heart is actually in subverting the very subject matter in trying to express something other than what is seen by hint of his inflections. To provide contrasts in color where there should not be, to gleam with his usual ultramarine and green and then sometime re-coursing to deep red in isolating the objects from its ground there is an illusion created, one of warmth similar to the light of home.
The sea-scapes are metaphors of enclosure and at the same time alienation for the artist while the flowers if any better than a beautiful adornment to walls in homes of the rich are a paradox of death and beauty. I mean, why can’t so beautiful things remain alive for so long? Sanso is an expressionist in the original sense if we take into consideration that expressionism is defined by historians as a cultural movement whose typical trait is to present the world under an utterly subjective perspective, violently distorting it to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of “being alive” and emotional experience rather than physical reality. (Wiki)
While it would serve us much to insist of his being “Filipino” it would limit our ability to know Sanso in the way he really is. The presumption casts an artificial mold on his person and would only yield formulaic and tendentious readings rather than truths. To place him in a certain framework utterly silences that many voices and wellsprings in his art. His paintings allow for multiple readings.
Let me start explaining why.
Sanso is as much a cultural icon as any of those with the National Artist medallion.
Before being great, Sanso started as a curious case in Philippine Art, among other reasons because he is not Filipino by citizenship. His contributions to Philippine Art however are doubtless some of the most important. The transcendence of skin-color and citizenship owes to the fact that the artistic community here does not really look into citizenship for acceptance. You see, artists are like citizens of a nation who put solidarity over a cause above everything else in their constitution. Although citizenship is required from time to time in functions like the CCP 13 Artists Awards or the Ateneo Art Awards, I am one to reject the importance of such. The art scene has a deeper underlying understanding of what it is to be Filipino and what it is to be great in the Filipino sense. The truly great can at once become part of it and be above it. In this case become Filipino and be more than the typical. That’s probably the reason why he is welcome in any country. Just as how Americans love ambition, Filipinos love more than anything else people with talent.
Some would argue that as a nation we do not consider some of our truly great artists like Juan Arellano and Alfonso Ossorio or for that matter Fernando Zobel canonically and universally great from us or for us but this is a ranting streak for another day.
Revisiting Sanso after months from viewing his show at Gateway Mall, one is prone to many afterthoughts dominated by an overwhelming sense of intangible realities, which simply prolongs the mystery of his persona and his works. Perhaps, that quality is what so impelled the crowd of the bewitched, and it was not so much the beauty and texture, the masterly technique so painstakingly applied, nor the sense of a lost world, a Brittany coast that is no more, a culture and a bourgeois milieu that have simply gone.
One great legacy of Sanso’s art is its insight that what we share as a global community is equal, in both interest and importance, to what makes each of us unique. He achieved this by embracing themes and practices from diverse times and places, and by imbuing them with an imaginative character and physical presence that is distinctively his own. In the materiality of his expansive expression, method and message become one.
His first show in England although represented in many American and French museums as well as private collection -Cocteau, Gian-Carlo Menotti and Rothschild, His painting fluctuates between shimmering abstractions built around a central core and images that seem to emerge from demolition sites like ghosts. They all have a dreamy, translucent depth through layer after layer of cohering pastel-tinted colour that takes on the look of filmy shifting cloud puffs. They are calm, lucid and personal water colours that have a convincing structure and a shrouded narrative illusion,”
- Conroy Maddox. Art ReviewTo be continued
