Engaged in continuous research and experimentation, Santini uses various different techniques and supports including copper engraving, drypoint on formica, lithography on stone, oil painting on canvas, encaustic on table, painting on silk. From his mastery of these manifold techniques were born the works that can described as “mixed techniques,” in which the artist wisely blended different techniques with his imagination and creative dynamism.
I began sliding the pencil over a sheet of paper, drawing without pause random signs, mostly curvilinear following my instinct. When I saw that the paper was saturated, I looked at those lines rotating the sheet on all four sides and stopping on the side from which I could confusedly see the subject to be fixed and completed.
This marked the beginning of the creative phase of my work and its stages of development can be observed below. At the end of the process, I noticed two interesting things:
1 - Colour plays a decisive role. In fact, the painted backgrounds enclosed within those curvilinear signs speak their own language, which is not a prisoner of the sign that encloses them. It is also a matter of rationally positioning those backgrounds.
2 - The whole composition is homogeneous, absolutely without pauses because it is conditioned by the initial flow of the pencil on the sheet. The sign, as you can see, is continuous. The whole is a homogeneous, “coherent” structure, which my mind now accepts and moves on to its organizational work.
This procedure from the outset keeps me from reflecting too much and from breaking the balance based on the instinctiveness of the line and its fresh genuineness. Naturally I find this very interesting, noticing that it is an original language that does not consist so much in letting oneself go and draw those uninterrupted meaningless signs that even a child could do, but rather in the way in which, retrospectively, the explanation of these signs comes out. Thus Picasso’s statement, “...I do not seek, I find” truly applies to my art.
Those signs may represent, in visual terms, the most hidden parts of my personality.
An instinctive, primeval sign that definitely influences a part of my work preventing me from adopting predominantly rational solutions. This brings to my mind a Goethe quote, “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others.”
