Nanni Guiso
Writer
Writer
The pictorial ecstasies of Saint Catherine either depicting her during her mystic marriage, or receiving the stigmata, or incessantly playing with her crucifix, or during her reoccurring flagellations, her face illuminated with an expression of ecstasy, these images have always given me with an idea of a character plagued by an exaggerated conflictuality.
It has always been difficult for me to understand the complex appeal, and the moral and historical stature of this tormented Saint shown here upon Enzo Santini's canvases and panels. A Saint who has served men with horrific theatricality, men who have divided her embalmed head and body between Siena and Rome; the macabre property of two different owners.
Her resolute preference for the crown of thorns, the stringent and uncomfortable meditations, her imperious shout, "To Rome, to Rome!", just as obstinate as the "To Moscow, to Moscow!" of the three unsatisfied sisters; these stories have always prevented me from fraternising with Catherine Benincasa, the Saint who thirsted for the blood of Christ and chose a repellent skull as her favourite desk ornament.
This is why, despite and maybe because of her crude nudity, the Saint Catherine of Enzo Santini appears to be the most probable.
Her anxious monumentality; an iceberg moored in an invented space, transcends canonic reality, transforming it into an archaic invention, dangling in turquoise interstellar spaces.
The historical description of Catherine that Enzo Santini has liberated of its celebrative and rhetoric iconography reveals with radiating clarity in "Contemplation of the Cross" the occasional con tact of the Saint with a world sublimated between the human and the divine.