Considered a personification of the Expressionist branch of Philippine Modernism, Sanso has seen both critical and commercial acclaim in an art career that both parallels and intersects significant developments in Philippine art. Born in Catalonia in Spain, he grew up in the Philippines and is a product of the College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines. He won successive gold medals for watercolor at the 1951 Art Association of the Philippines annual art competition before establishing a highly lauded career as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor.
Juvenal Sanso is one of the best-known members of the Philippine Modernist movement. Having graduated from the College of Fine arts of the University of the Philippines, he has as his contemporaries National Artists Jose Joya, Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, and Napoleon Abueva (his batchmate in UP). His teachers were National Artists Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino. A foremost master, Sanso has had a long and stellar career capped by a number of awards and recognitions including a King’s Cross of Isabella knighthood from the King of Spain, membership into te Order of Chevalier from the French Government, and a Presidential Medal of Merit from the Republic of the Philippines. His works are represented in the collections of some 40 museums in the world including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum d’ Arte Moderne in Paris, the Rosenwald National Galery of Washington, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His collectors include the Rothchild Family, Nelson Rochefeller, Vincent Price, Elsa Schiaperelli, Jean Cocteau, and many prominent American, European, and Filipino families.
Sanso’s unique ability to sublimate the angst and melancholy of his early Black Period works into today’s beautiful landscapes, seascapes, and abstractions, have seen him become one of the most sought-after artists of his generation. The clear progression of the artist’s conceptual inclinations, demonstrated by the transition of monochromatic gloom to multicolored optimism throughout his oeuvre, not only shows the increasingly mature relationship between the artist and his practice—it thoroughly validates a multidisciplinary approach that has experience in textile design and printmaking. Sanso’s burgeoning alignment with expressionism, his increasing international profile, and his many awards from around the world conspire to create a towering figure in Philippine art.
In his Seventies, Raul Isidro can successfully lay claim to being one of the most senior living Filipino visual artists of our time. The 1979 TOYM and 2006 Outstanding Thomasian Awardee has not given a day’s rest since his first burst to fame in the late Sixties and early Seventies with his distinct abstractions that derive their inspiration from nature. As Armando Manalo once wrote, Isidro was like National Artist Benedicto Cabrera, Rodolfo Samonte, and Mars Galang among the brightest stars of the Philippine Modern Art filament of the 1970s. This distinction was borne out of two inspiring moves: to anchor his work on abstract meditations of natural phenomena, and to instill in his memory the vibrancy of his idyllic childhood spent in the magnificent isolation of Calbayog, Northern Samar.