Claudio Santini: Spaces of Silence

 
Mute and apparently absent presences stand out against fields of saturated and intense colour.

Silhouettes of people, the effigy reduced to a few graphic lines that substantiate a presence detached from the context.

The artist Claudio Santini explores with this new body of works the relationships between space, human beings and spirituality. His works alternate figures, mostly interior and intimate environments, and large backgrounds of pure color, the latter invasive of a large part of the composition, affirming an undisputed and irrepressible self-presence. Color is the protagonist of these works that reflect on themes such as absence, silence as a meditative space, the need for spirituality as an intimate moment detached from the context and the environment that surrounds us.

Santini’s works rather affirm a need for introspective exploration which occurs pictorially by contrast and by immersion of the figure in that field of color so invasive and so present.

The person, or what remains of him, engages in a relationship with the space that surrounds him/her and with the emptiness that this space contains. But emptiness is not physical emptiness, just as space is not even real spatiality, but space of the mind that transcends contextual reality and isolates itself in a time of exploration of the self that resonates with meditation and transcendence.

In that precise meditative context the ideological, physical, cultural differences between human beings are cancelled: the very physicality of the person is transformed into the shadow of itself: it comes to be blurred up to the mere hatching of its outline.

The cancellation of every detail of its physicality is necessary for the artist to transmute his street photography towards the pictorial / digital work.

Santini translates and accompanies the photograph towards a context without any realistic accent although the presence of some interior design details such as a lamp, an armchair, a pattern give the whole an intimate imprint: memories of a home, of a container of proximity and connections.

The scene is clearly metaphysical in which De Chirico’s reminiscences infuse the whole with that accent of suspension of thought and judgment clearly existentialist and related to the phenomenology of the spirit.

The purely ideal context that emerges from these compositions, created through the presence of a mute and silent color field that is oversized compared to the whole context, represents the true purpose of the artistic exploration: the mind, the transcendent, the supernatural. Exploration attests and affirms itself on what is spiritual, evocative, and transcendental the human being can reach.

Rarefied atmospheres, an engrossed and deafening silence permeates and envelops the work as a whole. Loneliness as an existential essence that tends towards the elusive and the divine. A secular divinity, without religiosity, but centered on the essence of being and on the interiority of the ego.

These large presences made of mere color within the works constitute the pivot of the whole composition; they speak to those who know how to listen, they confront the soul, they present themselves as moments, times and spaces for meditation in which to immerse the self to obtain answers. They represent the true disposition of the soul to be explored and liberated.

Cynthia Penna, Curator