Sergio Micheli

SIDERAL GOTHIC AND SEARCH OF THE BEING

How often the screen image has stirred us to think of certain examples of figurative art! These thoughts are countered by the number of times figurative art brings to mind the cinema; where by nature the figure appears in movement, and not only after the invention of the cine-camera (as in the case of futurist painting), but, as we all know, a lot earlier.

We are talking about an artist who has addressed, not only the problem of representation but also that of narration. The artist substitutes the mobile form; full of symbols and significance, inert in a restricted and canonic space with one easily discerned in many illustrations throughout the history of Art: a form in its entirety which is articulated within the bounds of a happening action. There is a wealth of proof.

It is enough to think of the scenes at Pompeii in the Villa dei Misteri, where a youth who has to be initiated to the dyonisic games appears more than once in a wall painting and which posterior to the introductory scene, highlight the narration's development right up to its conclusion. During the Middle Ages, a period which is typified by the immobility of its subjects, the paintings become pure narration as is demonstrated by the splendid wooden panel of Beato Agostino Novello by Simone Martini and Sassetta's Sposalizio di S. Francesco in his allegorical depistions of Poverty, Obedience and Chastity. A later example, taken from a period when illustration assumes more free and fluid forms, can be found in the works by Masaccio (re: the typical example of the Tributo in the Brancacci Chapel), or by Sodoma (re: the frescos at Monteoliveto Maggiore); the examples are numerous.

After this introduction, positioning ourselves in front of the artworks of a painter such as Enzo Santini, we experience sensations and stimulations that are connected by more than one link to these historical precedents.

How exactly? To begin with, it is beyond doubt that Santini is constantly in search of a kind of vigorous tension between figurative elements, that are absolved by a function which tends to accumulate kinetic energy in a context made up of representative and not narrative characters. This makes Santini's use of line a direct reference to patterns and concepts that are, to a certain extent, derived from Gothic painting; a style which is profoundly imprinted on the Sienese artist's conscience.

…the latest piece of encaustic painting (Santini uses a variety of pictorial techniques), showing the face of Saint Catherine incites movement, resulting from the particular geometric structure of the whole where the curved lines; consequences of the positioning of the figure's head, seem to allude to an existence beyond; or to that space which exists just out of reach, (in the hereafter?) and is contained in a yet to be completed circle which must therefore be imagined.

The circle, in its most spacious acceleration, is the other reoccurring sign in Enzo Santini’s pictures.

Certainly it is no direct repetition of a perfect form such as that of the sun or the moon; elements that are punctually present in many of Santini’s works, (particularly in his city-scapes). The circle, with its infinite and varied centripetal and centrifugal modulations, becomes the backbone, an instinctive trait, the framework and grid of the infrastructure of his paintings.

If the circular figure represents, as has been noted, the most perfect geometrical form that is capable of being a symmetrical symbol and therefore is of aesthetic value, this is but one amongst many of its profound meanings.

The celestial bodies emptied of all substance by Santini, white and cold, silhouetted against an azure sidereal in their climate of gelide silence, seem to illuminate the city, ("Cultivate the countryside by moonlight", wrote Pasolini in Profezia), and immediately harmonise with that sense of circularity theorised in so much of the literature of the "verismo" movement.

Springs are released which, together with the most immediate phenomenon of empathy, evoke impressions centred around the facts of existence. A sensation that draws out the pessimism of our conscience, appears to assume a humanity which is destined to remain locked in a cyclic mechanism; without any possibility of breaking free of the circle of monotonous existence. As if

one phase finishes only to see another begin, a continuous recommencing from the original starting point.

However the connection between Santini's art and its gothic connotations, although clearly demonstrated in the symbolism of his figures, (which are represented as if of no weight, opalescent and without shadow), becomes less evident after subsequent reflection, and one discovers, other than the energy of impulse typical of the volumes represented, the data relating to expressive forms linked to the surreality of the "thing in itself" and the metaphysics of the "search of being".

The cities proposed by Enzo Santini, who at times uses a type of gestural and signer technique, (bringing to mind Mathieau, Hartung and Capogrossi), originate from the unplanned stimulus typical of automatismo and are conceived in the liberal execution of circles and spirals which go on to select, using a process of acceptance and rejection, the path of the traced line and demonstrate, as does the resulting work derived from this procedure, the characteristic structure of complex and arcane labyrinthine sinuousness which responds to an immediate incorporating and involving sensibility.

It is the canonic situation of a sign anticipating its significance, where the semantic import is systematically inverted: the denotatum, which is entirely determined by advance planning and rationality, appears to be casually anticipated by the liberal sign. The towers that rise above the city, could be reflections of the castles of Guidoriccio; clear-cut and white on the turquoise background of the sky, they seem to yearn far the freedom which they are structurally denied by the enclosing circle of the city walls. Santini's models are without doubt the cities of Siena, San Gimignano and Montalcino: Tuscany's hillside towns.

It is equally important to observe the evident link which these towers provide between the earth and the sky; points of photosynthesis aimed at trapping the solar/lunar energy needed to feed the substructure, the earth and the roots below.

In this sense the metaphysical component of Santini's art resolves its function, external to any transcendent meaning, (in the line of Jaspers for example), it seems to assume values similar to the "Revival Movement" supported by Sartre.

The fact that realistic form in contemporary figurative art has lost its importance after the exhausting invasion of visual art (and audio-visual art), such as that shown in the cinema, (a photographic medium portraying figures in movement and therefore, by nature, realistic), and that as a result the very art of painting has reverted to being a subliminal and elaborate expression of reality can appear today to be legitimate and necessary.

Should the form and body of Santini's pictures show itself to be diaphanous and liberated of all the laws of gravity, if its meaning belongs to a historical and metaphorical reality, (or a reality beyond), this but demonstrates a knowledge of today's world and a conscious adhesion to the present moment.

The anxiety, the uncertainty, the anguish which assail and agitate our daily existence and which become motives far profound reflection in contemporary art are today's subjects. One has only to think of the desperate vision, presented by cinematographic artists such as Antonioni, Fellini, Scola, the brothers Taviani, of the human condition in a savagely industrialised and consumerist society.

This same vision is presented in Enzo Santini's artworks, loaded with mysterious meanings and tension; mutated meanings and tensions that are mutated and launched from the traces of an alarming and surreal post-modem movement.