Provenance: Private Collection, Pasig City

ABOUT THE WORK

Adding to the enigmatic feel of Juvenal Sanso is the absence of the human element in his surrealist landscapes. The artist, though, has done figurative work in the past. The feeling of desolation, a brooding stillness, the iconographic absence of the human element. He conceived of nature in terms of color and light, and the atmospheric drama of isolation. Sanso views his subjects from refracted glasses tinted with the soft and melancholic haze of memory. The result is a technically masterly painting, scenes and images existing as though from a strange yet familiar world. Their indefinite perspective makes Sanso’s paintings emerge into the viewer’s eye as though from a haze of a distinct dream, at the edge of a timeless, surrealistic world. His detailed renditions of rocklike forms, which penetrate through voids of brilliant colors transcend the natural and take on a higher, mysterious level of reality.