Provenance: The Trafford Gallery

ABOUT THE WORK

Sanso comes up with a landscape of his imagination with grandeur of darkly turreted forms and brooding space and a unity of strongly diverse angularities that is not present in his other works. In the painting, one notes the dark strokes that cut across the grey sky that occupies more than half of the pictorial area. The overall tonality is a darkly subdued one compared to the glowing chromaticity of his surreal landscapes and seascapes. About the color black, Sanso was once quoted: “I was slowly working back into color which I did not use for a long time except sparingly, very sparingly.” Cid Reyes asked Sanso in 1973: ‘Are you...using your art not only as a medium for personal expression but also as a means of — I can’t find any other word — escape? An opiate perhaps?’ Sanso answered: ‘That’s a rather harsh way of putting it, but I feel that in general most artists have a hard time adapting to — what? The Reality of life? I believe that in any artistic creation, there is always an element of neurosis involved. It’s the only bridge we have left: it’s the last refuge from a world of madness, insanity and despair.’ Born in Catalunya (Catalonia), Spain, Sanso was raised in Manila and schooled at the University of the Philippines. Coincidentally, his dark turrets in the painting look like silhouettes of Catalonias’ Sagrada Familia. He has been awarded grand prizes in major art competitions in Manila in the 1950s and welcomed profusely each time he visited Manila in order to do commissioned work, yet he has spent most of his time in Europe, where, in his Paris base, he claims to relish the humbling competition with other artists.