Exhibitions

Following Galerie Joaquin’s recent exposition of Sanso’s “Brittany”, the gallery showcases the other definitive subject in the Sanso’s oeuvre: flowers.

Flowers have been an important subject of the artist’s work since the 1950’s when he made the floating bouquets – expressionistic works that featured singular bouquets of stylized flowers floating in a vast void. Prior to this, floral works in Philippine art were often as ornamentations to academic or religious works, at most still life or vanitas, but never as a deeply personal expression of angst and despair which a war survivor like him and his generation had. In Sanso, the flower was elevated to a level never before seen in Philippine art, and his legacy in this subject is still very strongly felt.

The great transformation of the floral form, from the floating bouquet to its manifold expressions in Sanso’s art in both painting and printmaking from the 1950’s to the 2010’s, namely the skulls adorned with flowers, the floating bouquets, the sprawling earth-bound wildflowers, the twilight flowers of his early works, to the foliar plants, the stylized abstract flowers which looked more like corals and other organic growths in black and white, colored, reverse series, and gold (painted in petite to mural-sized form), as well as the more recent orientalia, en vase, frame-within-a-frame, Felicidad of Sanso’s prime, and the introduction of the flowers in his late period modern, are a fantastic reflection of the artist’s constant quest for creative expression as well as his interior existential journey from despair to fulfillment.

All throughout his artistic career, Sanso continued sketching flowers from life, as he learned from his teachers, as part of the collegial activities with The Saturday Group, as well as from his own personal discipline of actively tending to sketchpads, drawing from his garden or setting up his own vases, as part of his perpetual quest for honing his craft. (It is quite remarkable to note that despite the simplicity of the sketch, its power is such that a gift of a sketch to a young Hans Sy later inspired in him to collect hundreds of Sanso’s works.) He would apply the subject on canvas and paper through painting, etching, silkscreen, collagraph, photography, and even in his textile design and cliché verre.

Sanso once remarked that his flowers are not copies of flowers that exist, but instead, he paints flowers following the logic of what he called “the architecture of flowers” – how the flowers sprout from the stems and how the leaves branch of radially, bisectionally or alternately. In short, Sanso created his flowers from the visual essence of real flowers, and applied it to different mediums and created a variety of styles that touch on the rich spectrum of meaning humanity has associated with flowers that covers fragility, ephemerality, mortality, anguish, and despair on one hand, to their opposites: tenacity, vitality, hope, affection, love, acceptance, and fulfillment on the other.

Perhaps no other Philippine artist has extracted as much from the humble flower. And perhaps, his floral oeuvre shows Sanso’s creative genius the best.

“SANSÓ ABLOOM” will be on view from May 21 - June 4, 2023 at Galerie Joaquin Rockwell. The gallery is located at the R3 Level, Power Plant Mall, Rockwell Center, Makati. The Galerie Reception is slated for May 25, Thursday at 6 PM. For inquiries, contact Galerie Joaquin at +63 915 414 5502 or email galeriejoaquinrockwell@gmail.com.