Provenance: León Gallery, The Magnificent September Auction 2016,
Makati City, 10 September 2016, Lot 136

ABOUT THE WORK

Charmed by Brittany, France’s beauty, Juvenal Sansó decided to make it his permanent residence in his later years and immortalize its scenic beauty in his paintings, albeit twisted. In this untitled painting, Brittany’s coast’s rock formations and calm water once again decorated Sansó’s canvas. His vibrant, monochromatic orange palette, shadowed with darker hues, created a warm and murky image. A yellow circle was strategically placed at the center, above the horizon line, signifying a setting sun at its brilliance. His landscape and seascape themes, while giving off a sense of solitude and tranquility, also create a striking contrast with his style and colors, which present a somewhat otherworldly distorted terrain. Juvenal Sansó’s artistry and gradual rise to the art scene are products of his own talent and determination. Despite the prevailing and emerging styles, Sansó worked toward his personalized figurative approach, resulting in countless mysterious, surrealistic portrayals of the physical world. “The mystery in Sansó’s art is the mystery of universal man’s motives. Within each of us there is a dark motive lurking. In all of us there wages conflict between an outer, socially acceptable, self and the repressed subconscious. The landscape of our subconscious may be familiar to us but not one we can readily identify,” Alfredo Roces wrote in his monograph, Sansó, in 1976. (Jessica Magno)