Hélène Cingria
art critic
art critic
Whether the subject portrayed is a landscape, a city, a human figure, an animal or a flower, the element that characterises the art of Enzo Santini is his passionate endeavour to reach the intimate essence of beings and things. Using as he does all the resources and multiple variants of painting and lithography, by deconsecrating and by striving to know everything about his subjects, he expresses the anguish impregnating all of his works. This anguish is truly his, a sort of metaphysical unrest that spurs him continually to outdo himself in search of the ideal perfection to which he aspires. Rigorous technique then serves not to lessen but to temper the fantasy of his imaginary universe.
Consequently everything becomes along with him a struggle within his overflowing imagination, which pushes him to create strange characters such as creatures with webbed feet, armed with claws, who, in an extraterrestrial space, trace unknown dance figures with the authority of a brushstroke that gives the creatures themselves their bizarre shapes, their position and their attitude, all serving to keep everything in harmonious rhythm. This is even more astonishing in the “Battle of the Gladiators” in which the bodies clutching each other in wild fury end up annihilating one another without losing their human appearance in the jumble of limbs deformed by their exertion.
Santini excels in suggesting visions of which he evokes merely the features but which, once seen, stand out as reality. This city among others that all at once rises up hieratic with its sharp-profiled bastions, its well-drawn spaces, its geometric towers, its innumerable windows, its multiple stairs that climb toward the sky, this city that as soon as it appears stands defensively against an unknown threat; this city that holds a secret the key to which you will never have but that will remain etched into your memory because of its mystery. Equally memorable will be the image of this palace surrounded by water with small arches open to the sea, allowing glimpses along the horizon of birds born in the distance, birds that might symbolise hope. Everything stands as a message in this eloquent work where nothing leaves the viewer indifferent, especially the animals whose most characteristic behaviours Santini masterfully displays. From the “Homage to Goya” where the dauntless eye of the superb bull contemplates the horse bent at its feet, which, though defeated, loses none of its purebred elegance, to the “Combatant Rooster” which, proudly erect, stiffens its feathers. Moving from a landscape to peaceful beauty, its patch of light blue cleverly maintaining the shape of the bull, Santini made use of art’s many secrets in offering an extraordinary variety of images, each different from the other.
Using all known processes, ceaselessly inventing new ones as well, happily shifting from soft colours to a stronger outline, playing with light to give life to constantly renewed forms, a true magician of an art rich in the most diverse possibilities, he found answers to challenges through the application of his own original techniques to which he entrusted all the dreams of his soul passionately sparked by poetry of the purest kind.