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SANSÓ’S DAWNSCAPES
For his major show for the year 2008 and also to mark his 79th birth anniversary, Presidential Medal of Merit awardee Juvenal Sansó presents a rare exhibit of artworks developed from a technique that he developed in Europe when he did the set designs for some of the more important opera houses in Europe.
Entitled Dawnscapes, which opens November 21, 2008 at 7 pm, at the 2nd Level of the Podium Mall along ADB Avenue, Ortigas Center, this unique exhibit features a collection of works rendered following a technique the artist refers to as ‘reverse painting’. The show is being organized by Galerie Joaquin Podium.
Why reverse painting? "Simply because it’s done on a black canvas," says Sansó, who also describes the technique as a laborious one that includes the painstaking layering of color over black. The objective of the whole process is to "approximate the lighting conditions of the theater", an effect the artist finds both dramatic and haunting.
The dramatic effects of the theater atmosphere - its darkened confines and strategically lit corners - are a fascination for Sansó, and theater work itself holds a special place in the artist’s heart. As a young set designer in the 1970s in Europe, he had met and worked with some of the finest names of European theater and produced exemplary work that was met with much critical success.
In the late 1970s, Dario Cecchi, one of Italy’s best known set designers for film and theater, suitably impressed by Sansó’s "baklad" and "barung-barong" paintings, described Sansó’s work as "obviously made for theater design." It was the first, highly encouraging and rather serendipitous push in a string of fruitful introductions.
Cecchi then referred Sansó to Lila de Nobili, another legendary name of European theater, who in turn arranged for Sansó to meet Gabriel Dussurget, then the artistic director of the Grand Opera House of Paris and the Aix-en-Provence Music Festival. Dussurget, as in turned out, was mounting "Wozzeck", an opera by Austrian composer Alan Berg based on the tragic drama by German playwright Georg Buchner and first performed in 1925. For the opera’s dark themes - the exploitation of the poor, abuses in the military, madness, dehumanizing pursuits in the name of medical research - Dussurget thought Sansó’s style for his "barung-barongs" was just perfect.
To present his concepts and vision for the sets and costumes, Sansó executed drawings on black paper using colored tempera to closely simulate the ambience of the stage. This began Sansó’s experiments with the black canvas, something he did for a series of works in the 1980s and again most recently for his upcoming show. Twenty vintage paintings from those years in Europe done in tempera on black paper together with twenty recent works in acrylic on canvas make up this exhibition.
Dawnscapes, which features various landscapes on the cusp of daybreak - from the Philippines to Spain, Italy to France, Greece to Iran - is Sansó’s own personal tribute to the his former colleagues in theater and to the places that have inspired his art all these years. |
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