Roberto Barzanti

THE WORLD OF ENZO SANTINI

The visionary tension which holds up Enzo Santini's work has never had any yielding and it shuts the work of a painter in a unique and unitary speech; he has always preferred a dialogue with himself and with the beloved universes to the easy alignment to current tastes.

There is something stubborn and ascetic in the way to understand the pictorial experience which animates Enzo's days. It will not be by chance that one of his beloved laboratories was a small church placed on the top of the small hill of Vico Alto. Siena can be seen far away: a mirage town.

Indeed one of the most developed streams of inspiration in the works included in the wide anthological exhibition sheltered in the wide Catherinian cycle - which is put up by the general Consultate of Italy in the glamorous residence of Columbus Centre in Toronto to be then removed to the Julian A. Mec Phee Californian University Union Galerie - is the one of a fantastic town the 'invisible town' so to use a famous definition by Italo Calvino. Bright buildings under electrical blue peacefully nightlyskies, gothic spires and arches suddenly flourished, mysterious spaces syllabized by a metric which rejects constructive obligations and real references.

When Enzo Santini was called to paint the picture of the 'Palio' the feast which unites and opposes Siena districts in a development of thesis and jocund contrasts, Enzo expounded the difficult task painting a pale and attentive Holy Mother, stylised in oriental shapes, aware of a tradition which dates back the golden centuries of sienese painting. The town stood out in the moonlight, the town was like a minaret, the silence surrounded it in a definite measure. A disposition as a miniaturist of enormous gothic building, the elegance of a neither nightly nor gloomy gothic style can be seen in that figure.

In the pictures which show the various phases of Caterina Benincasa's life, this genius of Enzo Santini, that is his capability to retake the shapes of a flourishing tradition in creative and learned terms, is shown at his best here. In the 'dantesque' vision of Caterina and Francesco only souls in a light flight, too, or in the 'prayer of return' one of the most perfect moment in Enzo's religious meditations. Perhaps the first letter of a code is fit for suggesting the volume of a boat, the veil of the Saint quivers in the air, the avignonese palace stands up magic and towered in the night. We are struck by the essentiality reached and allusion to the passionate petition to an uneasy Pope whose presence is merged in a bright red embrace.

The poetry of our artist unfolds like a mix of faithfulness towards stored forms and a new invention of a very mediterranean epos. In fact if the town landscape has got a gothic dryness, the representation of a duelling bloody vitality stands in a kind and marine light. Rival metallic and pointed cocks like hoorible war machines face each other with determined cruelty. Gladiators who challenge in the ironic and called moonlight. Wild bulls which get loose in desert arenas. The coordinates of sensibility and culture within which Enzo Santini's world stands, appear evident: they are the once of his more frequent travels, of his lasting and primordial ties in Provence, Toscana, Avignon and Siena, mediterranean Europe and towered towns sure like harbours in an everlasting expectations. A kind air, inscribed in a revival of dry gothic form, alternates to an imaginative research of wild fights; the calm contemplative sight changes into a prayer, the impulse of violence subsides in a love conquest. That is enough to remind joyful dissension and the polite elegance of ancient civilisations which charged painting with the care of uses and spaces exposed to predatory corrosion and to the deafening noise of a transitory modernity.

In a word a moral lesson comes from the calculated figurative art of Enzo Santini: it is not a rhetorical message but the nostalgic appeal of a measure which is being lost.

THAT “HARD, HARD SILENCE”

With the cycle dedicated to Saint Catherine (or, for those who prefer more aseptic precision in identification: to Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa), Enzo Santini proposes in twelve stations an unprejudiced and altogether personal reflection on a life that cannot be retold through our more familiar concepts of discussion, or through the analytical tools currently in fashion. Sometimes it is better to call upon the imaginative flair of artistic creativity when endeavouring to delve into a mysterious decipherment of times and events that resist confinement within explanations and commentary based on plausible logic. Hence the itinerary that Santini suggests, reinterpreting in the manner of sacred depiction, through exemplary paintings, several of the most frequently revisited episodes in the Catherinian canon. Courageously has he removed them from the gracious Gothic-style version that has long been cultivated. And he does not give in to edifyingly-intended childish simplifications intrinsic to luminously realistic portrayals of legend. Instead, Enzo has chosen to exalt the unrestrained corporeity of a rebellious woman. He modulated his work—conceived during five long years of experimentation and solutions from 1989 to 1994—with the ancient and freshly surprising techniques of his alchemic laboratory: encaustic painting, first and foremost. But the encaustic painting of Enzo Santini grows from an original formula. The ingredients inevitably remain virgin beeswax, high temperatures, and thickened colour. His work, however, proceeds in singular steps: he applies white paint to the panel; when that has dried, he brushes it with hot wax; and finally, after smoothing the surface once it has cooled, he is free to paint. He paints with water-soluble pastel colours, which blend with the wax and take on the peremptoriness of those found in frescoes of old. To pause upon these aspects does not mean to dawdle over preliminary questions or preparatory phases. The modernizing of procedures used as far back as Ancient Egypt and rich in astounding traditions is an integral part of the work, arising, in terms of its contents, from the desire to unite antiquity with modernity, mystic-ecstatic experience with psychoanalytic investigation, in line, I would say, with Jungian research into archetypes open to multiple decodings. And this, then, is the journey that Santini unfolds with the characteristic force of his poetic images, rooted in a powerful and Mediterranean surrealism, leaning toward figurative dramatization, tending toward a kind of dynamism that strips away the superfluous and lays bare the essential. The Catherinian texts are, after all, dense with sharp metaphors and forceful allegories, the presence of which can be sensed beyond the highly calculated compositions, defying a definition of the sacred as a liturgical contemplation and opting decisively in favour of a sacrality that rouses horror and terror, prompts meditation, stimulates startling interrogatives. Take, for example, Return from Avignon. Its foothold in history is clear, and there is nothing vague in the reference to turbulent navigation in a journey which the fearful Gregory XI hesitated to undertake until the very last minute. The Saint confidently points the direction, blown along by a comforting wind, closed in a boat with the shape of a protective cradle-like niche, while in the distance the massive Palace of abandoned diplomatic contention lies encamped. The atmosphere is like that of a fable. All that is happening can be understood through symbols that have the graphical texture of a historiated initial in an illuminated manuscript. The geometry presiding over Meditation is no different. Here, too, the Saint turns toward the light. The architecture explicitly recalls a familiar skyline. A turreted Siena appears pink in the Eastern-style background: a serrated gathering of modest houses, and sharp belfries, and a hollow dome that serves as the epicentre. In the foreground, a quiet hortus clausus—an enclosed garden—and a well, source of baptismal waters. The column, cracked, evokes a fragile stability; the sphere calls to mind perfection and wholeness. The pointed cypresses add an element of naturalism reminiscent of so much Sienese painting, of the countryside that at all times remains the landscape of the soul: an oasis of condensed spirituality, far from the city of divisive factions. Here and there a staircase—a stairway, as is written in the Book of the Divine Doctrine—leading upward, toward the yearned for path to salvation. “Be of good cheer, every soul”—and here I quote from the Book in its much talked about Fiorilli edition of 1912—“that suffers many troubles, because that is the road to reach this sweet and glorious state.” And again: “For already have I told you that, through knowledge and hatred of yourself, and through knowledge of my goodness, would you come to perfection.” This anxiety of perfection is the theme that shines in an Edenic garden, in the hortus clausus, indeed, of the inner life. And how can we not recall the verses of Mario Luzi describing the eve of a homeward course that Simon, perhaps, is about to undertake? “In that point of light and fusion / time faded / and every frontier / between loss and gain, / between reckoning and squander. / Nevertheless: in motion! / this it was, yet from whom? the command.” The figures in the scenography created by Enzo obey untamed forces and are driven by invisible powers. With Lo sguardo (The Gaze)—humble and courteous, intimate and dreamy, shy and virginal, and paradoxically with her eyes closed—Enzo pays homage to the face of Caterina as it was painted, with a disciple’s rapt admiration, by Andrea Vanni. Similar to that of an Indian deity, caught up in her impenetrable vision of the Eternal, immersed in arcane worlds unknown to those incapable of breaking the barrier to the phenomenal, she acceptingly abandons herself to a “hard, hard silence.”