Accompanied by a certificate issued by Fundacion Sansó confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Galerie Bleue

ABOUT THE WORK

Despite Amorsolo being his idol, Juvenal Sansó diverged from the former’s sunlit world and instead led his viewers into a contrasting, darker realm. Contrary to Amorsolo’s use of light to demonstrate Filipino life—its calm, pleasant, and picturesque nature—Sansó uses light to turn a landscape into a grotesque image. His works, in the words of Nick Joaquin, “dared proclaim that the Philippine light also has black in it.” Sansó has a penchant for twisting ordinary images and painting them in his own light and perspective, creating a hazy, dream-like image. This late 1960s painting, Curling Honors, manifests the artist’s mastery of this style. Despite his use of a light palette of blues and greens, this work gives the audience an illusion of depth and distortion. A painting of a bunch of greens, of plants and bushes, under a blue sky can never look so haunting, right? But Sansó did just that. His use of acrylic paint on paper gave the image a slightly rough texture. This, along with his strokes of thin, feather-like lines in the plants, creates an eerie atmosphere of a different realm. Juvenal Sansó’s art reflects his life experiences. Born in Spain, raised in the Philippines, and later settling in France, his images have a pigment of these influences. His bright childhood in Montalban, surrounded by nature, the dark, traumatic events of the Japanese Occupation, and the picturesque landscapes of France, all contributed to the composition of his images. Regardless of his location or the prevailing art styles, Sansó has, from the words of Alfredo Roces in his monograph, Sansó, “single-mindedly worked at his own craft” and “persisted with his own personalized figurative approach.” (Jessica Magno)