Immutable Truth
signed (lower right)ca. 1970s
acrylic on canvas
25" x 35 1/4" (64 cm x 90 cm)

Accompanied by a certificate issued by Fundacion Sansóconfirming the authenticity of this lot
PROVENANCEPrivate collection, USA



A Balm for a Lost Soul The World in the Eyes of Sansó’s Poetic SurrealismThe 1970s was a decade of travel for Juvenal Sanso. From 1965 to 1973, he visited Europe, the United States, Mexico, and parts of Asia. He had also divided his year between France and the Philippines, embarking on yearly trips to his home country to escape the cold Parisian winters. However, home is a nebulous concept for Sanso. Born a Catalonian Spanish, the Sanso-Pedret family left their home country to settle in the Philippines in 1934 when he was four years old. Physically light in a sea of dark-skinned, darkeyed, and dark-haired Filipinos, the Sansos stood out. The Spanish community in the Philippines was as different from the family as the Filipinos – the Sansos were not Catholic, not Castillian, and indeed not of the same political ideology as the Spanish in the country. Juvenal was reared as a true Tagalog-speaking Pinoy but the otherness is stamped into him from the get-go. Further muddying of the waters began when Sanso settled permanently in Paris in 1952. Now French in spirit and sensibilities, Sanso finds himself a mixture of different nationalistic inspirations. He was now both too European for the Philippines and too Filipino for Europe. “The Filipino experience is the strongest of them all,” Sanso told Leonidas V. Benesa and Ray Albano in an interview for his 25-year retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1974. “Of course, being away from the Philippines makes my paintings even more Filipino. I’m sure if I came back to the Philippines then all the European things would come out.” Writer and journalist Nick Joaquin agrees. “Sanso’s Philippines is thus ambiguous,” he writes in the introduction of Sanso: Art Quest Between Two Worlds, “home and exile; intimate and outlandish.” This otherness that plagues Sanso is evident in his 1980 Immutable Truth. Created just as he settled permanently in Manila, the flora depicted in the canvas are both unrecognizable and familiar. The twisting plants could easily be found in the fishing districts of Cavite and Parañaque as they could be on the shores of Brittany – two of the many places that Sanso found himself drawn to. Sanso’s isolation became the source of angst in many of his works. And yet, here it became his strength in Immutable Truth. It is viewing the Philippines with Spanish eyes or seeing the shores of Manila on the Brittany coast. Sanso finds snippets of home everywhere he goes or perhaps everywhere he went reminded him of home – either way, Sanso’s Immutable Truth is an amalgamation of every city that took him in, be it in the country or outside. “His startling landscapes are the newfound land that Magellan saw, that Legazpi beheld, that Morga analyzed,” Nick Joaquin continues. “So if [his fruits, flowers, fences, fishponds, and nipa huts] strike you as bizarre although obviously Philippine, bear in mind that those things are being viewed…by an eye looking back at them across four centuries.” (Hannah Valiente)