In uncredited newspaper file photo, Sanso with tycoon Henry Sy, Sr. Sanso’s family and Henry Sy, Sr. shared a durable kinship, which started when they were neighbors in Manila.
The Philippines mourns the passing of Juvenal Sanso (Nov. 23, 1929–March 28, 2025), the Catalan-born artist who led his life in the Philippines starting in the war years, and who helped redefine Philippine visual arts with his masterpieces created from various media, including photography. This only son who didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps in business, indulged instead his creativity, with a most adept pair of hands, acute gaze, a heart so sensitive to the world, and a mind and imagination that knew no bounds.
Since my first interview with him (read below) in 1988, when I edited his book Sanso: Art Quest Between Two Worlds, written by his fellow artist Dr. Rod. Paras-Perez, I have had the privilege of spending time with him over lunches or meriendas with Dr. Rod and his other artist-friends, such as Malang. In those downtime moments of candor and hilarity, we talked about anything and everything, from his inspiration to his opinions about burning issues in the arts, to his travels. I remember how he lamented how shower contraptions in hotel rooms had become very complicated designs so that, he laughed with sarcasm, you needed a background in engineering to use them. Yes, Sanso also knew his design.
Sanso was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Merit, the Distinguished King’s Cross of Isabela, Spain, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
Below is our profile and interview of Sanso, written in 1988, and included in our book, i’m afraid of heights (or why I can’t social-climb), published in 2012.
Fundacion Sanso post on social media
1988
Juvenal Sanso is home—for now.
If we were talking of an ordinary person, that would have been a simple statement of a person’s whereabouts. But then there’s hardly anything ordinary about Sanso, the person and the artist.
Sanso was born in Catalan Spain. When Sanso was four, his father migrated to Manila and in time put up the country’s pioneer wrought iron business.
Sanso grew up in Manila, never went to regular school, began his art here, then later sought himself and his art in Rome, Paris, Brittany, and God knows how many other nooks in the world and on his mind.
Today’s, he’s an acclaimed artist abroad and one of the country’s foremost artists, a complex blend of the East and the West, a free thinker whose art has always veered away from prevalent schools. Just by pursuing his non-regular self, Sanso has enriched our culture.
And yet, the pursuit hasn’t been easy. This much we learn from the second and the latest coffee-table book on Sanso entitled Sanso: Art Quest Between Two Worlds by Rod. Paras-Perez.
In the book published by Eugenio Lopez Foundation and launched last month at Lopez Museum, Sanso graphically spoke about an unconventional childhood, the nightmares left him by the war, his estrangement from the sunlit and idyllic world of Amorsolo, his teacher. This was when he turned to the dark side of man in The Sorcerer and Incubus—works which won for the young Sanso first prizes in the Art Association of the Philippines competitions in 1951.
Sanso is here on a visit from Paris where he has been based for many years now. We met him for the first time last week, yet it was as if we had known him thoroughly—that was how effectively Paras-Perez has probed the innermost recesses of the man.
Sanso is staying in the family home in Makati—a cozy Mediterranean style affair whose elegant wrought-iron grill work makes it immediately apparent that it is owned by people who built the famous El Arte Español, the firm that pioneered in wrought iron furniture in the country.
Sanso lives there with sister Mina, who has been running the thriving family export business, his brother-in-law, niece and mother.
Sanso lets us into his world as effortlessly as he does one into his home. For he is highly articulate—as adept with words and ideas as with the brush. In this alone, he’s an atypical artist.
‘The words are too slow for my mental process,’ he tells us later
“The words are too slow for my mental process,” he tells us later.
He leads us up to his studio, its calm grey walls unable to mute the clutter around. It’s filled with his canvasses, photographs, books.
Sanso is here not only to launch his coffeetable but also to prepare for exhibits to be held simultaneously in seven galleries in February.
These are set at the Metropolitan Museum, Lopez Museum, Ayala Museum, Centro Cultural, Alliance Franchise, Finale and Renaissance.
At Metropolitan, he’ll exhibit anchor pieces showing his creation process; focusing on his barung-barong series from 1957 to recent years; at Lopez, he’ll have his first retroactive show of his graphics; at Ayala, his photographs of the Philippines; at Centro, Spain in the painter’s eye; at Alliance, his Brittany series; at Finale, his Ati-atihan which combines photographs, drawings and graphics. He’ll also exhibit hand-painted slides—a rare stuff in our art scene.
This line-up manifests Sanso’s boundless creativity and restlessness. “They’re only part of the vast things I’ve been doing,” he says.
Philippine art has been made richer by Sanso’s paintings, drawings, prints, and now photographs and miniature, hand-painted slides.
Local art buffs are familiar with Sanso’s landscapes and seascapes, the amoeba-like stones, rocks, flowers, bamboos—nature infused with his angst and nightmares.
But this time, we’ll see photographs capturing the Philippines as he sees the country—from Baguio with its walis, San Andres market with its fruits, Laguna de Bay with its shimmering water, Montalban with its Ati-atihan.
“Photography is a magical thing. By pressing the button, I can have an image,” he describes the craft he started as early as 1946.
In some of photographs, he tried using a prism to create a sunburst of color. A stroll at Central Park in New York led him to this technique. He found a baseball on the grass and saw a group of kids peering into a piece of plastic held up against sun.
“They were enjoying what they were seeing, the burst of light. I peered myself. I traded the baseball for the plastic, and I’ve been using this item ever since.”
This is so different from his hand-painted slides he calls pictographic. Ten years ago, he began to work on acetate which is half the size of a slide, painting on it, rubbing it, dabbing his finger prints on it—experimented with just about any process to create nebulous images bursting in color.
He works on a slide for days—a painstaking exercise made more bearable by the fact that Sanso is nearsighted, so he can somehow have his eyes glued to that miniature canvas for hours, concentrating on the image. The slide is then processed like you would a photograph.
In a way, what Sanso has stumbled on is photography without the use of camera, its image done by hand.
In Europe, he also designs theater sets and costumes when he has the time. It was in an opera production in Aix-en-Provence that he tried using those hand-painted slides beamed through a projector, their images bathing the audience.
Sanso is also a diligent student of the art of making movies and wishes he could make one. “But time does not allow it, and one has to work with many people, consider the money needed that in the end it becomes a less personal task.
“Movies are showing downtime. Photography is cutting time short. I decided to marry both in my hand-painted slides.”
To Sanso, having this myriad of activities is like “planting thousands of seeds you can harvest later on, one at a time.”
With obsession and a drive for perfection, he manages to do all these by, he says, “splitting up time—like living within a slow-motion picture.”
‘When I can’t do what I like to do, my stomach acts up—literally. It’s a physical thing’
How he switches from one activity to the other depends on his urge. “When I can’t do what I like to do, my stomach acts up—literally. It’s a physical thing.” He says in his typically graphic manner.
“On the other hand, when I’m enjoying my painting, my mouth waters. This happened in Spain, as I was showing Betsy (Brias, the well-known portraitist) how to work with acrylic. I was enjoying it so much I was drooling and couldn’t help it.”
How does a man get to be as engrossed in creation as Sanso is?
The answer lies somewhere in how the artist has lived.
They’re only two in the family. His father, the late Jose Sanso y Perdet, was an artist who could create marvelous works with iron. When the family migrated to the Philippines and the father opened the wrought-iron shop in 1934, Sanso was thrust into a different world.
His childhood was different. He didn’t go to school because his father didn’t believe in formal education
His childhood was different. He didn’t go to school because his father didn’t believe in formal education. “My father was inspired by Rosseau. He preferred less structure, not sectioned off at all.”
Thus the young Sanso was tutored at home. His father also didn’t believe in religion, so he didn’t go to church.
“You have to be a real sponge to get educated. It’s having a final college degree that cuts you off from school and education. There must be no hard edges to cut you off, to make you say, Now, I know.”
The kids in the neighborhood found Sanso different not only because of these things but also because his mestizo looks set him apart. He learned to live with such taunts as matang pusa, bangus. (Sanso has bluish green eyes.)
Then came the war. The Japanese wanted to use their wrought iron factory to produce weapons but his father refused to collaborate. They stripped the family of all its possessions—“all except the shirts on our backs,” Sanso recalls.
The family had to take refuge in Montalban—a place forever etched in Sanso’s art—where they had to plant camote to survive. Montalban’s idyllic beauty and the deprivations of war the family suffered there left in Sanso a dual attitude towards the place.
Sanso also was injured during a bombing—an incident which would give him nightmares way into his adulthood.
After the war, the family started from scratch to rebuild the fortune it had lost. The older Sanso constructed home-made buses which plied the route from Sta. Ana to Quiapo. Once in a while, the younger Sanso would work as bus conductor and often, as dispatcher.
Rather well known in the art circle is the durable kinship between Sanso’s family and Henry Sy, Sr. Sy was not even on his way to starting his retail business then. A neighbor of the Sansos, he would very kindly offer to keep watch in the Sansos’ home whenever the family was out on vacation once a year. Little did anyone know then that the youngster would become one of the country’s significant artists, and the Chinese-Filipino neighbor would become the country’s richest man.
It came as no surprise then that Sanso’s exhibits, now and then, would be held in the SM malls.
Sanso’s father rebuilt the wrought iron business, expecting his son to continue it. But the young Sanso was inexplicably drawn to art. His father got him an art teacher hoping his son would use what he’d learn on the wrought iron.
“But I’d be mesmerized whenever I watched our workers paint on the vases. One Sunday, I sneaked in and messed up with the painting. I was nine or 10.
I’ve always been envious of talent, not material things. I feel terrible pangs of jealousy when I go to museums and see the works of the great masters.”
Sanso didn’t learn wrought iron design, nor did he continue the business. After the war, he went to the College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines—his first formal education—where he came under the tutelage of Fernando Amorsolo.
There one day, he found the master looking over his shoulders watching him at work—it was not one of peaceful rural scenes, as was identified with Amorsolo.
“My willed side wanted to be Amorsolo but something drew me away. There had been a war and I no longer saw the lovely rural scene, the pink carabao school, but the ruins of Manila, the barung-barong everywhere. I saw humanity—down stairs and midsection.”
From UP, Sanso decided to go to Rome where he studied, then on to Paris, at L’Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts.
He loved Paris. It was the time of Existentialism and he would hang out in the café frequented by Sarte and his circle. He would eavesdrop on their discussions.
From this point on, Sanso anchored himself not on any place but on his art.
“My best art piece is my life,” he now says. By that he means not only what he has done but also what he has not done.
In 1964, he had a show at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and was declared Artist of the Year by Cleveland Print Club. This was followed by an exhibit at Weyhe Gallery in New York and at Philadelphia Print Club. Then he was approached by men he calls the “wolves of international mafia gallery”—top brass in the international gallery business—enticing him to sign a contract so he could be promoted worldwide.
“But they would have rights over my works and dictate to me what to do.” He refused.
Sanso just wants to be free.
“My frustration is that there’s only one life to do all the things I want to do. I do so much in this life because I don’t expect to have another life.”
On November 23, Sanso will turn 59.
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Excerpted from the author’s book “i’m afraid of heights (or why I can’t social-climb) published in 2012
