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JUVENAL SANSO (his first name means a feasting of youth) is another kind of second coming. Two or three
generations after Spain withdrew from these islands, here is this Peninsular giving us images of a country
that, in the days of his grandfathers, was both theirs and ours.
SANSO's Philippines is thus ambiguous: home and exile; intimate and outlandish. His paintings and sketches
are about 400 years late because his is the Spanish eye, the Peninsular eye, viewing the Philippines for the
first time. Had there been a Sanso with Magellan or Legazpi, his work would have been a "juvenal" indeed:
a celebration of youth and decadence as represented by newfoundland, a young tropical Eden. The too-late-born
Sanso of our time can still be credited with "Juvenal" but profoundly disturbed has been the feasting of youth
that his art should have been.
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BORN in Spain a Catalan; reared in the Philippines a freethinker; Tagalog speaking; Pinoy of stomach; now
French in spirit and residence; and imperturbably a bachelor—Juvenal Sanso is a moral Babel. He could not
have remained at home in the Philippines because his family was "different". They could not be understood.
THE Spanish among us can strike roots in our ground because they share with us so much of what's in that ground:
religion most espcially. But the Sanso's were not Catholics, were not Christian at all, had no Gods. Even from their
fellow Spanish were they separated by race and politics, not to mention language, since their native province of Cataluña
has a violent history of separatism, demands independence from madrid, and jealously clings to its own culture, which
is more Southern French than Iberian, and to its own tongue, which is not Castilian. To the rest of Spain therefore, the
Catalan is a griffin.
IMAGINE how much that "griffin-ness" must have been accentuated when the young Juvenal, at the age of four, was
brought to Manila, where his father opened a wrought-iron shop in Paco. Blue-eyed and blond and fair-skinned, the boy
stood out among a people dark of skin and could not but feel himself an oddity, especially since the pregnant kept
touching him in the hope of transferring some of his blondness to the child in their womb.
THERE were other things to remind him that he and his family were "different." They didn't go to church; not only that,
the children didn't go to school either. They were tutored at home. And though there were other Spaniards in town,
the Sansos did not associate with them, being anti-Fascist.
THE war tested that political militancy by ruining the wrought-iron business of the elder Sanso and offering him
salvation if he worked for the Jap's war machine. Sanso the father rejected this fascist temptation and instead set up a new
business: the construction of horse-drawn buggies in the "dokar" style, using car tires for wheels. And during the
Liberation, old man Sanso was first on the streets with a home-made bus, the young Juvenal being the shrill-voiced
conductor on this first postwar bus to ply the route from Santa Ana to Quiapo.
THE turning point of Juvenal's youth was when his father hired the artist Alejandro Celis to teach the boy painting.
The elder Sanso had started another wrought-iron shop. Arte Español, and he hoped artistic training would ensure
Juvenal's success when he took over the business.
WHAT happened was that Juvenal Sanso realized where his vocation lay—it was not in wrought-iron. He got
father to let him enroll as special student at the U.P. School of Fine Arts (Juvenal's only taste of formal
schooling) and at the U.P. he fell under, and escaped from, the spell of the Maestro: Fernando Amorsolo.
BY the 1950s he was winning art prizes, had studied under Antonio Garcia Llamas at the U.S.T., and had traveled
in Europe. He came home, ready to begin a career in the art, and the Philippines had finally got a Peninsular eye
looking at it and reporting it.
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A mystery is why neither of the two empires that colonized the Philippines ever produced a great artist
to report the Spanish and American experience in the islands. The experience of the English in the Orient has
been turned into enduring literature by a Kipling, a Maugham, an E.M. Forster, a George Orwell, a Graham Greene.
But from the Spaniards and the Americans who year after year during their respective colonialisms came to the
Philippines to spend a tour of duty or a lifetime, arose no equivalent of Kipling, whether in letters or the arts.
(ONE hears that General MacArthur's son is now an artist in Greenwich Village, but one doubts he's doing any
recollections of the Manila of his childhood.)
THE non-appearance of an American Kipling is so astonishing because Americans of the 1900s were agog over
their entrance into empire and simply raving to hear all about their tropic-island colony in the Mysterious
East. But none of the U.S. army brats who lived in Zamboanga or Lanao or Fort McKinley grew up to become
the poet of the Empire Days.
NOR was Spain any more fruitful in over 300 years in producing a peninsular literature on Las Yslas Filipinas.
Towards the end of the 18th century appeared a school of Creole writers in Manila, inspired by the Era of
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but what they wrote now has only a historical, not literary, value.
That their chief dramatist was mocked in Madrid for still writing obsolete cloak-and-dagger plays indicates
that these Manila Creoles were not really writing about the Philippines. As for the Peninsulares, some officials
like Morga and host of friar authors did not write important tomes on the Philippines but these were all histories
andreportage, not creative literature, not Art.
SO, we can now signal the place of Juvenal Sanso in our culture: he is the belated Kipling of the Spanish era,
a Peninsular finally expressing greatly how the Philipines appears to the Peninsular eye. His startling landscapes
are the newfoundland that Magellan saw, that Legazpi beheld, that Morga analyzed. So if the fruits, flowers, fences,
fishponds and nipa huts in Sanso strike you as bizzare although obviously Philippine, bear in mind that those
things are being viewed with first time wonder by an eye looking back at them across four centuries.
AH, but Sanso is at the same time a contemporary. Reacting to the dazzle of Amorsolo light, Juvenal the disciple
has dared proclaim that Philippine light also has black in it. The extravagant Manila Bay sunset is followed by a brief
twilight in which black bars in the foreground stripe the still glowing crimsons in the background, as in
characteristic Sanso canvases.
THE Catalan is gaudy as in the architect Gaudi; and flamboyant as in Picasso; and morbidly romantic as in its
fatal Provencal heritage of dualism and heresy.
THESE qualities show in Sanso, battling the Amorsolo optimism, and turning the ordinary into outrageous grotesques.
His prizewinning Incubus depicted, says he, "my dis-association from the sunlit world, a going into the
wounds themselves."
WHEN he established himself in Paris, it was a second withdrawal of the Peninsular from the Philippines.
But in spite of "mindscapes of Britanny," we think his eye is still fixed here: on the bamboo palisades
of Parañaque and Cavite.
THE Peninsular become islander — and the islander become Peninsular — is the entire history of our Spanish years.
(*taken from Sanso: Art Quest Between Two Worlds)
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Lopez Memorial Museum » Art Galleries: Modernists — Juvenal Sanso
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Leafing through a sheaf of Sansos in reproductions, we got this weird feeling of clairvoyance,
as though peering through an eye not ours: another eye at once native and alien, that made the
familiar unsettlingly unfamiliar.
