Bernie Sason: Material, Memory, and the Persistence of Making

In Kapampangan, Bangi is the burnt rice that settles at the bottom of the pot. It is the last to be served, usually reserved for the family. Eaten with relish at the end of a meal, it is savored with the last scraps of soup or sauce, enjoyed with zest and an appreciation for every last morsel.

And so it is with art in an artist’s senior years.

Like Bangi, it is the beautiful culmination of a life lived, created out of sheer joy—with no pressure, no need to prove, no urgency to please. It flows in the gentle rhythm of a relaxed spirit, where creativity becomes a quiet celebration of being alive.

Each stroke, each color, each moment is savored in sacred gratitude.

Art, in these years, is no longer about becoming. It is about being—fully, freely, and joyfully.

Like Bangi, it is the last serving, perhaps, but never the least. It is the partaken joy of a life well lived. 

—Oly de los Santos

At eighty-four, Bernie Sason continues to expand the boundaries of a practice shaped by decades of sustained making. An architect and furniture designer by profession, his recent engagement with the visual arts is a natural extension of a lifelong commitment to material, form, and experimentation. His work resists the idea of a fixed discipline, moving fluidly between architecture, furniture, sculpture, assemblage, drawing, and painting. Across these varied forms, one principle remains constant: an insistence on the possibilities of transformation.

Originally from Pampanga, a province associated with exceptional traditions of wood craftsmanship, Sason eventually established his practice in Negros, bringing with him a team of carpenters and artisans. Alongside his architectural projects, he designed furniture in wood, steel, and leather, presenting his work in local and international trade fairs in Germany, France, Spain, Japan, and elsewhere. This extensive experience in design provides an important foundation for the works presented here, where functional knowledge and sculptural intuition often converge.

At his workshop, where he works six days a week, Sason experiments with salvaged materials, particularly wood recovered from old houses. In the Topography series, fragments of reclaimed timber, some retaining traces of their original paint, are assembled into wall-bound reliefs. Their surfaces become records of previous use and accumulated time, while their arrangement transforms discarded material into new landscapes of texture, rhythm, and depth.

The female figure emerges as a recurring motif. In works combining figures of seated women and furniture forms, Sason incorporates yakisugi, the Japanese technique of charring wood to blacken its color and enhance its durability. His Susu series moves further toward abstraction. Made from the wood of old hacienda railroad tracks, these works consist of multiple breast-like forms shaped with a lathe, an affectionate homage to women, whose presence has long informed Sason’s imagination. Many of his chairs bear female names, while his sensitivity to fashion, ornament, and design can be traced to his mother, a seamstress who made gowns for beauty pageants. This early exposure developed into a sustained fascination with clothing, jewelry, shoes, and personal style. Works recalling Vogue magazine covers foreground the patterns and colors of dresses, while a steel chair incorporating skeletal forms and skulls pays tribute to the dramatic theatricality of the late British designer Alexander McQueen.

Sason’s material vocabulary also extends to smooth river rocks incorporated into furniture and lamps, and to a monumental thirty-foot length of acacia wood from Antique. Repaired using chigiri, a Japanese technique in which butterfly-shaped wooden keys are inlaid across splits in timber, the repair honors the wood’s history and emphasizes that fracture and imperfection need not diminish value.

Drawing and painting are part of a more immediate dimension of Sason’s practice. Working with pen and ink, watercolor, and acrylic, he produces abstracted faces and figures marked by exaggerated body parts, geometric forms, and occasionally the discipline of a single continuous line. These works often emerge spontaneously, through a daily, stream-of-consciousness process. While they recall the influence of his friend Nune Alvarado, they also belong to a broader rigorous work ethic shared with succeeding generations, including artists such as Charlie Co.

Even these two-dimensional works refuse to remain purely planar. Sason frames them with recycled wood and jute sacks, transforming drawings and paintings into tactile, three-dimensional objects. Throughout his practice, material experimentation becomes the unifying force. His vast, meticulously organized workshop stands as both a working environment and a reflection of his ethos: decades of discipline, an aversion to idleness, and an enduring belief that creativity is sustained through constant engagement.

For Sason, making is not simply a profession or a late-career pursuit. It is a way of remaining attentive to the world: to discarded objects, damaged surfaces, the human body, fashion, craft traditions, and the latent potential of materials. His work demonstrates that artistic practice is more than a linear trajectory; it can accumulate, absorb, and continually reinvent itself, much like the reclaimed materials from which many of these works begin.

By Stephanie Frondoso