Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Juvenal Sanso is possibly the most accomplished landscape artist in the Philippines today, and his mastery of flora organically extends to his still lifes. In this work, A Dream Song, Sanso offers the viewer a stalwart bouquet whose stems are fat with nourishment and the flowers — five red globes — appear to hover and actively rotate. It surges upward in its sheer verticality before fanning out to frame the silver disk of a heavenly body. The blueness of the background sets off the bouquet, as though it became all of a sudden true to touch . The work is a signature Sanso — an affirmation of the life-giving quality of earth as well as the heart-stopping forms of beauty that it offers us generously as a gift.