Adriano Madaro

ENZO SANTINI, A TAOIST

Santini is a gift of the eternity of painting to our uncertain present, a present rather devoid in substance of perspectives and themes. The metaphysical suggestion of the Sienese landscape of the soul stands as an angular certainty on the foundation of his art.

A fellow citizen of his comes to mind, one who left an indelible mark on 13th-century Sienese painting: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, whose “city of good and bad government” is so plastic and sensual as to become an icon of that era, like a Taoist vision of existence in which the best action is non-action. Enzo Santini is, in his own way a Taoist, and his Sienese essence confirms my hypothesis. The contemplation of time outside of time took him by the hand, in my view, and led him to a non-choice: not to paint.

It takes courage, recklessness or arrogance to ply the art of the painter in Siena after all what happened in the 1200s, the 1300s and the Renaissance. I cannot even imagine what this “weight” meant to a man of our times like Santini, who lived between the Piazza del Campo and the hundred horizons opening to the eye from the towered city. The unfinished search for the “ideal city” comes to mind, another metaphysical vision of Piero della Francesca in which to pour the orthogonal yearning of human destiny within the horizon not of countryside but of architecture as the sublimation of an interior landscape.

The “Crete Senesi” clay hills are overwhelmed in their speechless metaphysical enchantment by the equally “natural” beauty of the overlapping scenes of “baked clay,” red and turgid like throbbing flesh turned into walls, houses, churches, towers, campaniles, streets, arches, palaces, contradas, Siena!

Finding himself inside, a predestined interpreter in the midst of it all, Santini could not help but be involved. I understand him, and it even strikes me as natural, walking alongside him through his Siena, that each step appears a unique place in the universe where men like him can still be born, grow, and become artists, devoted praise-singers yet at the same time caustic defamers—in the fullest-blown Tuscan style—of a city that eight-hundred years later still celebrates its victory at Montaperti over the scoffing Florentines, combatants who, though often trounced, find frequent occasion to see themselves the victors.

Siena is still all Ghibelline in spirit, at once holy and iconoclastic. Yet even in holiness Siena must in the end be just as Enzo Santini portrays it.

With Saint Catherine, Siena is fatally the anti-Assisi: none of that which il Poverello—the Little Poor One—was and stood for, with his gentle beatitude, can be compared to the turbine of “municipal” activism of a wilful and pragmatic woman, the second-to-last of Jacopo Benincasa’s twenty-four children. Pious as you please, but possessed of a political strength that led her to Avignon to reclaim the Pope and, after seventy years of papal absence from Rome, bring back a reluctant Gregory XI to the threshold of Peter, fearlessly accompanying him on a Mediterranean crossing not without peril.

And so Santini found himself within view of Saint Catherine from the time of his childhood when his pious mother, undaunted perhaps by the macabre, took him as if to a party to admire the Saint’s head displayed for public veneration in the Church of San Domenico, right beside another holy relic where the Saint’s thumb is venerated as well. These “pieces” are not hugely attractive, especially not the mummified head that must have filled the boy with a little horror and, possibly, fear. But he grew up amid unavoidable familiarity with that icon, and he even came to terms with it by observing the lay indifference of a father far more caught up in the political struggle against Fascism. The contrast between maternal devotion and paternal scepticism taught him to peel off the Saint’s veils, and to rediscover the young Catherine of the people, full of fresh sensuality even to the point of denuding her to show the erotic forms that exalt the manifest purity and sacredness of the flesh, which seems to me a sort of liberation for that face devastated by death for over six-hundred years.

Santini appears to me as irremediably enamoured of “his” Catherine, and I believe this love matured as a consequence of his attempt to transform that surreal relic into an object of desire—a desireperhaps entirely spiritual and platonic but with inflections of human sensuality. Catherine is not the only theme of his painting, though she is surely the strongest.

Painting, such as that of Enzo Santini, is, as I have suggested, non-painting, or is rather an extraordinary “manipulation” of painting. For it is the Maestro—and the time has come to confer upon him this sacrosanct epithet—who is once more a gift we receive from far away, from the tradition of technical experimentations of the past blended with his personal innovations of the present.

And it must be said that he does not paint but creates his works with his hands alone, using his fingers, that is, as the only tool in keeping with the ancient art of encaustic.

Retracing the Egyptian origins of this technique overlooked for millennia, fascinated by the alchemy concealed within its secret and somewhat magical formulas, Santini appropriated this lost knowledge. Mixing the use of virgin beeswax, as the ancient decorators of Thebes and Memphis used to do, with that of modern water-soluble pastels (all the better if the pastels were made in Germany), engraving, scratching, scraping and “polishing” with wax and other concoctions the composition of which were known to him alone after continual experimentation, he ultimately gave us works which I find it appropriate to define as classical, in the most intrinsic sense of the word.

So I come to conclude that he is an artist of our time bestowed upon us from a faraway time (Egypt of the Pharaohs) and from a time less remote, the Sienese Middle Ages and Renaissance, which still dazzles us with the splendour of its light.