Pio Santini 1908-1986

(1908-1986)

The manner of Pio Santini - [21/08/05 by piosantini]

By ANNE BRANDEBOURG, art critic.

In a general rediscovery movement of the best figurative artists who have marked the last century , the museum of the Thirties exhibits and reveals the quality and personality of Pio Santini’s work, whose art remained, until now, unrecognized.




THE PAINTER FACING HISTORY

Keeping himself apart of the avant-gardes of contemporary art, Pio Santini (1908-1986) developed a personal work of a great formal coherence very steadily. He is a two time artist, the one of the beginnings of his career, the Thirties, and the other one, his rebirth, the Sixties, when the artist can again devote himself body and soul to painting. 

Between these two periods, the Second World war badly hit the pictorial growth of Pio Santini, yet it had all started auspiciously for the young painter whose determination to be devoted to painting is clearly shown in his self-portrait, 1928, like a manifesto. The Thirties, after the successive revolutions of cubism, abstraction and surrealism, had made figurative art and the "carnal one" fashionable again, by the assertion of an aesthetic vitality quite close to Pio Santini’s concerns. His former sculptor talent (Bust of the Count Colonna, 1929) can be found in his painting in the proportions and volumes of the bodies.

   

His nudes have a hedonist vitality in which the animated touch intensifies the sensuality: Lying Nude, Nude with a plait. The chosen subjects are traditional and the approach is deliberately figurative, but the animated touch of Santini, his bold but sure taste for colours, transfigures his iconography. Pio Santini avoided all the traps of the "restoring order" represented by the neo-classic movement, pomposity, totalitarian ideology... At this time, the painter is already, fully and serenely himself.

    After 1945, the predominating taste changed and the legitimacy of naturalist figuration is a debatable point. The 60’s triumphing language tended more towards Pop Art, opposite to Santini’s pictorial universe. Modernity, in a cyclical break with tradition, wanted then to be synonymous with progress and provocation. These concepts nourished the uncompromising avant-garde ideology. On the other hand, Santini was in keeping with the figurative tradition –then so disparaged - with courage and modesty. During this unsettled artistic period the painter started to exhibit in Paris, Rome and Milan.

Little by little, the Parisian galleries were opening up for him, reputation took shape, thanks to the great prizes he won during Parisian official Exhibitions, among which the prestigious Great Prize of the French Artists (1970). Although he had committed himself in the great figurative tradition of classical style, in a time when it was out of fashion, Pio Santini’s work is still ignored by general public.

QUIET LIFE
Santini’s favourite subjects have some of the characteristics of such simple and traditional categories as portrait, still life, landscape... What renews them is the manner of Santini, a direct and intimate view, an intense and grave approach which shows a reflection on the human being mystery and the quiet life of objects. The painter tries to express the world more than to express him. He gives us an inkling of beauty in the Jug, Children playing, Fabien, Marina, Quatuor, Girl with the swing...

 

The jug, children playing,

Fabien, Marina,

 

Quatuor,

 

 

Girl with a swing... Pio Santini’s painting is filled with the same intensity, and the same respectful attention to the subject, however modest it may be: the English Teapot, Peonies, Still life with an opaline...

 

 

The English teapot

 

The material is beautiful and sensual, the touch is perceptible and both are part of Pio Santini’s power in painting, just like the strong and contrasted colours producing a right sound 

like in “The bass player”, and a climate full of nobility such as in “My Parents”. The range of colours used by the painter can get softer and more limpid for the benefit of a fair light in which happiness is immobilized:

the Family Boat, a childhood memory. Or this other canvas looking like a Monet in Giverny, representing another Boat which slips ideally in the light.

 

The memories deeply rooted in Italy, the walks in the Villa d’ Este, close to the large family house in the Cittadella, are delicately described with a hot and pink limpid light bathing 

Tivoli landscape. Years after Le Lorrain and Corot, Santini, in his turn, expresses the plenitude of this Italy balanced by his style and the sunlight which give the painting space and greatness. 

Then come the snapshot paintings. As you would steal pictures, the painter captures with a nervous touch the image of a family in” Fréjus”, or the one of a “yellow beach umbrella”, strangely centered on the canvas, pinned to the horizon in an impassive realism. Because of his ability to fix his feelings in a rare and apt sensitivity, Santini seems to breathe life into objects. 



LA COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE

"Pio Santini. A painter who has a sense of the fantastic. It is so uncommon! «As the writer Colette said. The set of Santini’s most typical paintings is a closed, clearly defined place (studio, stage, orchestra pit, circus ring...), crossed with characters, “Catherinette” (25 and unmarried) , who seems frozen in a solemn and comical stupor, “Roma Carnival”, or a real space, like a room in which a real presence, as if in suspense, trace an enchanted circle in the light,” Antonello”. Pio Santini’s universe is also the circus children’s one, 

“The clown and the equestrienne”, brothers to the poets and the painters, whose nomadism gave a meaning to their life.

“The end of the journey”. Pio Santini was deeply devoted to his Italian roots and to the culture that gave a place to the theatre, the opera, the art of words, the music of words and the colours. While painting he found the spirit of this theatrical form: the commedia dell' arte, an art which had never existed but on stage. The painter set the ones he loved: parents, children... and created an intimate theatre, close to the actors’ universe. That’s how Pio Santini represented his three sons,

“The three brothers, side by side like proud entertainers: "the parade", with a blustering look under their occasional hats. An alienation effect that sets them apart and makes them belong to the space of time. Santini sets "his" Italian comedy stage, with singular accents and dramatic tones, with strange or derisively details, poetic fragments of the performing arts that he collects with keen observation. The force of the paintings is what they suggest, 


“My Parents”, “The teenager declaimaing”, “The box” (cover), “Gloved Harlequin”, “The cabman in the sun”...

 

and the “Spanish dancers” in a whirling and proud flamenco.





 

"A great painter is the one who finds personal and durable signs to express finely the object of his vision", Matisse wrote. Pio Santini found his. With his refined sense of marrying the bright colours, the painter has built his work as a sumptuous Harlequin costume that his symphonic paintings open out in the light.
And then, the emotion arises from this tiny serious suspense where the painter leaves his objects and his characters -"a pause of life in the bosom of life "- Goethe wrote about the mark of beauty.

 

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