Not many people know that he’s an avid photographer,” said Ricky Francisco, executive director of the Fundacion Sansó, pertaining to the Spanish-by-blood, Filipino-at-heart international artist, Juvenal Sansó.
Over the course of our conversation, Francisco repeatedly introduced an idea about the decorated icon with the same four words. He said not many people know that Sansó was the first artist to present an all-print exhibition in the Philippines in 1957; that not many people know his family was agnostic; that not many people know he was deaf on his left ear after an artillery shell blasted through their house during World War II.
Such may be the case for the artist mainly identified with his signature flower paintings and seascapes. There’s still a whole world to be known about him, which the ongoing exhibition at Art Lounge Manila, titled Juvenal Sansó: Jubilation, tries to present through phases of his art.
“People tend to focus on just one section of Mr. Sansó’s works, but we wanted to give them a background so that they could understand, among other things, the connection between his earlier works, which are mostly figurative, and his latter works, which are abstract,” Francisco said. “Mr. Sansó is more than what they think he is.”
Sansó is a man of experimentation and perfection. With burning curiosity, he explored different mediums and pushed their limits to come up with truly unique pieces. It’s a type of curiosity, however, that defaulted from seclusion.
Sansó was born in Reus, Catalonia, in Spain in 1929. He moved to Manila at the age of five with his family, who established a wrought-iron business in Paco. While Sansó spoke Tagalog fluently and freely bonded with boys his age, including Henry Sy, there were numerous factors that kept him and his family away from society.
For one, they were full-blooded mestizos, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. His family was also agnostic, and he was homeschooled. Moreover, many Spaniards in the Philippines supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, while the Sansós were strongly anti-Fascist.
“But during the time that they were separated from society, Sansó’s curiosity really pushed him to experiment in new mediums,” said Francisco. “He would do copperplate etching using a brayer or etcher, then later on evolve and use chemicals to create different types of effects.”
All the while, Sansó continued painting. Then the war came and his life changed, along with his art.
“I had a very traumatic experience as a result of the war,” Sansó is quoted as saying in his web site profile. “Our fortunes were destroyed, my family had to flee back and forth between Montalban and Sta. Ana.”
The events ushered in the artist’s Black Period, when he painted exclusively in black and white with gruesome imagery and hideously deformed beggars.
The dearth of life and hues in his pieces marks one extreme of his 70-year artistic career, with blooming abstractions of red, green, orange and blue on the other end, influenced by his summers in the Brittany coast with the Le Dantec family.
In a span of seven illustrious decades dedicated to the arts, Sansó has created countless pieces in various mediums, garnering priceless recognition here and abroad. Among them was the Presidential Medal of Merit, the most prestigious award given by the Philippine government to an artist for his invaluable contribution to visual arts in the country, awarded by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2006.
The following year, he was bestowed by King Juan Carlos of Spain with the Distinguished King’s Cross of Isabela for his exemplary work across national boundaries. In 2008, the Ministry of Culture and Communications of the Republic of France conferred Sansó with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which is akin to a knighthood or the Member of the British Empire given by the Queen of England.
Despite earning recognition that seal his importance in the local and global art circuits, there’s still much to learn about Sansó, according to Francisco. For instance, he discovered thousands of painted Kodachrome slides that Sansó created between the mid ’70s and the late ’80s that never hit the market.
Francisco told Sansó that the pieces were fantastic, and asked him why he didn’t show the pieces to the public. Sansó, then still lucid, replied, “Galleries only wanted flowers and landscapes.”
This is why Francisco and Fundacion Sansó are on a mission to reintroduce the artist in a new, broader light.
“Right now, I’m focusing on the abstracts,” Francisco said. “A lot of people find these disturbing because they don’t show the hallmarks of Sansó, the flowers and the seascapes, but if they would only understand, he started working on these in the 1970s.”
“It’s not new to him,” he added. “But to many people, it is.”
Image credits: Vance Alfonso