Exhibitions

There are times when it becomes inevitable to relate Expressionist Maestro Juvenal Sanso with Spanish cubist Pablo Picasso. They both trace their heritage to Catalonia, for one—Sanso was born there, while Picasso moved there as a boy in 1895. Both spent a considerable part of their career in Paris. And they both approach their practice in the same intellectual way.

"If the lines and forms rhyme and become animated, it's like a poem," Picasso once said, describing the art of painting in black and white. Three paintings in particular demonstrate Picasso's capability in monochrome: the famous "Guernica" (1937), "The Charnel House" (1944-45), and a variation of Eugene Delacroix's "Women of Algiers" (1954-55). In these works, Picasso revels in the lyrical quality, using monochrome to emphasize form. Similarly, Juvenal Sanso's works in black and white jettison color as a distracting element, allowing other components to come forward. It is a highly considered and thoughtful method—one that the renowned painter manages with seeming ease.

Of course, Sanso is more than a Cubist. His expansive oeuvre, traversing several decades of productive work with little sign of slowing down, demonstrates his range of pre-occupations. And he is also, in many respects, an Asian artist. Growing up in Manila, studying under National Artists Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino, and sharing in the pain of World War 2, Sanso absorbed many techniques and influences from his own jarring experiences. From landscapes, to prints, to abstractions, Sanso is an artistic polymath.

It is his black and white works, however, that should likewise elicit the reverential awe of the art community. In these works, we can trace a lineage of great modernists—an Expressionist modus that maximizes sparseness to great effect. It is precisely within this framework that one should view the works that Sanso is unveiling in an exhibit that opens at Galerie Joaquin this month, from November 20 to December 2, 2014. Entitled "Sanso: Black and White," the exhibit puts together the seminal monochrome works of this legendary artist in an exhibit to cap an eventful art year.

Galerie Joaquin is located at 371 P. Guevarra Street corner Montessori Lane, Addition Hills, San Juan City. For more information, please call (632) 723-9418, or email info@galeriejoaquin.com.

Presidential Medal of Merit Awardee Juvenal Sanso can be considered a personification of the Expressionist branch of Philippine Modernism. His trajectory has seen both critical and commercial acclaim in a storied career that both parallels and intersects significant developments in Philippine art. A foremost master, Sanso has had a long and stellar career capped by a number of awards and recognition, including a King's Cross of Isabella knighthood from the King of Spain, membership into the Order of Chevalier from the French Government, and a Presidential Medal of Merit from the Republic of the Philippines. Born in Catalonia in Spain, he grew up in the Philippines and is a product of the College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines. He won successive gold medals for watercolor at the 1951 Art Association of the Philippines annual art competition before establishing a highly lauded career as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

Sanso's black and white works rank among the purest manifestation of his Expressionist sensibilities. Although faced with the Herculean task of working with a sparseness of colors, the works still provide enough information for the viewer to recreate and interpret reality with their own imagination. Such is the skill which defines Sanso as one of the truly great Modernist artists of today. With his usual frenetic strokes and bold gestural lines, he is armed only with the chosen minimal colors of white, black and its subtleties of tones in grey. Yet the result is a visual opus. It successfully extracts emotional, psychological and cerebral reactions from the viewer.

Each of the works on exhibit is complete and excruciatingly detailed. The landscapes are panoramic and highly imaginative interpretations of vistas and panoramas, which Sanso had seen throughout his life. These include vistas of the 24 summers he spent in Brittany, France from 1960-1984, his early years as a student visiting the coastlines of Batangas and the rocks and rivers in Montalban where the Sanso family evacuated during the dark years of World War II. Also included are composite memories of the coastlines of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New England, and the places the artist visited during his younger years, wherever wanderlust took him. The floral paintings, on the other hand, are lyrical and poetic, succinctly capturing the artist's five-and-half decades long enchantment with the subject.