Juvenal Sansó’s enduring spell on canvas
My first memory of Juvenal Sansó (1929-2025) isn’t from a museum or a book, but from a painting we had at home. At a student-run fundraising auction at the University of the Philippines in the 1960s, my grandmother reluctantly raised her paddle out of obligation to the fundraisers, then brought home a work she hadn’t meant to buy.
Back then, his pieces were sold for a modest price. Little did she know that the painting would take a prime spot in our foyer, with his luminous landscape of Brittany becoming the most precious, gazed-at image in our home today.
This is the power in the artwork of Sansó, which oscillates between the real and surreal, the intimate and monumental, shaped by the artist’s personal history, which was at times as turbulent as the seas and as tender as the blooms that fill his canvases.
A life from turbulence to transformation
Born in 1924 in Reus, Catalonia, Juvenal Sansó moved with his family to the Philippines at five years old, where his father established a wrought-iron business in Manila. The calm he would later paint was hard-won: during World War II, their family home was burned down, he was tortured by Japanese soldiers, and a nearby bomb blast left him partially deaf.
Post-war, supported by his father, Sansó pursued art studies at the University of the Philippines under Fernando Amorsolo, making do with postwar scarcity by diluting his paints with fruit juices. These upheavals left their mark on his early works, which often carried a somber, nightmarish quality, like flowers blooming from skulls or haunting figures twisted in chiaroscuro.
Soon after, Sansó pursued formal studies in Europe, training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In Paris, he studied under French expressionist Édouard Goerg, whose influence can be seen in Sansó’s use of deep colors and unconventional compositions. A friendship with designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who sponsored one of his exhibitions, also opened doors to the city’s finest galleries and artistic circles.
These years exposed Sansó to both classical rigor and the modernist avant-garde, broadening the vocabulary he would later employ in lush seascapes, floral compositions, and dreamlike terrains.
In 1957, Sansó returned to Manila after his first one-man show at the Galerie de la Maison des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By this time, he had matured as an artist and was encouraged by Fernando Zóbel to explore printmaking and etching.
Over the decades, Sansó built a vast body of work that brims with years of passion, distilled into canvases that are both emotionally charged and imaginative. His paintings move between inner and outer worlds, carrying a poetic sense of color that feels at once personal and universal.
Sansó at auction, here and now
At this year’s Magnificent September Auction, León Gallery presents a strong selection of Sansó works, from floralscapes that seem to bloom underwater to meditative seascapes anchored by stone.
Think foliage abound, as “Stately Verdure” (Lot 21) shows leaves rising like a sculptural column, layered in deep greens and teals, with rosebuds accented in warmer shades. The same vertical energy animates in “Spring Tribute” (Lot 44), where its blossoms clustered like an arrangement suspended in water. “Moonlit Offering” (Lot 22) is particularly striking, showcasing glowing white blossoms against a deep blue background, recalling the translucence of corals at twilight. Meanwhile, “Serenity in Bloom” (Lot 56) heightens the drama, setting a meticulously painted flowerbed against a striking crimson backdrop.
In his landscapes, Sansó paints at a softer, warmer register. “Bay at Rest” (Lot 97), takes inspiration from his extended time on the Brittany coast with the Rouault family, capturing the calm of sea and stone. “Tide and Grove” (Lot 101), a long horizontal composition, stretches greenery into the horizon under yellow sunlight, also anchored by the artist’s signature stones. Finally, “The Latest Aspect” (Lot 152) returns to these stones, this time under a soft mist, with geological forms transfigured.
Together, the works on the block form a portrait of Sansó at his most lyrical—flora, sea, and stone, all ethereal, meticulously done, and with pensive atmospheric qualities.
And in many ways, these works echo the artist’s own reflections later in life.
“Water has been a constant companion through my life… lolling in the water, entranced by the mirages of the brilliance of the ripples leaping into life,” he writes in his poignant 2007 essay “Summer.”
In the same piece, he admits, “The intricacies of landscape vegetations and flowers have dominated two-thirds of my mature life as I slowly began shedding the expressionist drama of my post-war lingering images.”
A seven decade-career
In a career that spanned seven decades, Sansó created a fantastical world that was all his own, in what critics have called “poetic surrealism.”
His works glow with strong visual harmony, at once ethereal and contemplative, yet always emotionally charged. Shadows of the war he endured in his youth linger in their depths, but tempered by beauty, calm, and his personal reconciliation.
For his epic 20-year retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Sansó says in an interview with Leo Benesa and Ray Albano, “You cannot replace the artist, the person behind the art. It should be as personal as a fingerprint. Barring that, then he’s just like any bakya-maker, an artisan. There must be that personal impact of an irreplaceable human life.”
For Sansó, art was a lifelong pursuit that consumed every hour of his being. “Think of the effort; think of the hours of work a painter devotes to his art! When he holds an exhibition, he has to be a painter, PR man, and host,” he remarks with wry humor, in an interview with art critic and painter Cid Reyes, published on Lifestyle.
In the end, Sansó’s greatest luxury was not recognition or the astronomical prices his canvases now command, but freedom. “The biggest luxury I have is freedom,” he tells Reyes, “It’s a myth that old people should die with somebody holding their hands.”
Freedom seems to have been Sansó’s compass, painting his way through trauma, beauty, and imagination. Such freedom continues to live on in his canvases, as irreplaceable fingerprints left behind for generations, still luminous, still resonant, and very much alive.
León Gallery’s Magnificent September Auction 2025 starts at 2 p.m. on Sept. 13 at G/F Eurovilla 1, Rufino corner Legazpi St., Legazpi Village, Makati City
