The Pending "Sante"

(In Italian "Sante" is feminine-plural, and "Santi", masculine-plural)

GENESIS. Around 1997 my very long, twenty-year materialist period was exhausting its evolutionary function and I began to feel that not everything was there in matter. I needed to go further. Religions did not convince me at all, in fact I was a convinced atheist. However, inside me there was a need to feel, reason, inform myself and fantasize, which led to a theory that was new to me, where there was no longer an Here and an Hereafter. I felt that everything was here (or there!), even what was once believed to be in the Hereafter, and vice versa. Quantum physics (I had therefore read Ftitjorf Capra and other authors) was realizing that it was close to sharing at least in part the “Vedic” knowledge of the ancient “Indian rishi”, that is, that there is no separation between the two worlds, it is one and only universe, made of vibrations and parallel and interconnected dimensions, which you are more or less able and prepared to feel and experience. You no longer had to wait to die to understand if there was something in the so-called AFTERLIFE! You could start investigating with all possible means right now... and it didn't matter if you started from religion or atheism.
I had to somehow integrate "spirituality" into the paradigm I used to live. I didn't know it yet but it was for this reason that I experienced a cathartic and liberating love even if passionate and painful. Then life forced me, with a not insignificant accident, to the easel enthusiastic about being able to paint without distractions!
My pictorial journey was almost a self-initiation. When I began this project without knowing it, I knew nothing about esotericism, alchemy; about what the sexual tantric path, the Kundalini, really meant... yes, in fact, only by hearsay. Doing these paintings was like doing long meditations on themes that, far from understanding rationally, I was planting like seeds in my inner world, where they would blossom as a new, more evolved consciousness.
IN SHORT. This project is based on a figurative painting in which the female figure dominates, symbolically set in an atypical spiritual space, a neo-paganism critical of religions and conventions to which I gave the name "THE SUSPENDED SAINTS", suspended between heaven and earth, spirit and matter, Agape and Eros: the two apparently separate worlds of the Here and Now!
Each of these paintings, almost always oil on canvas, is born around an aesthetic idea that is not always clear and limpid, indeed, often casual, emotional and unconscious, where through the search for beauty, for what pleases or "intrigues", for the assonant or the dissonant, we realize in the end that we have unwittingly juxtaposed symbols already seen, obtaining unexpected but no less valid meanings.
11/1/2019 - S.B. read more ….

THE PENDING “SANTE”. This series of paintings gives free rein to my ruminations, fantasies and reflections on various interconnected topics: the woman as a biological and psychic being, her social and historical image, power and religious beliefs, polytheistic “paganism” and monotheism, mythologies.
The language is symbolic, ironic, burlesque, sometimes blasphemous when it mimics distorting Christian iconography; always evocative. The “Beauty”, the images and the history of the ancient classical Greco-Roman world have always fascinated me and from there I draw my inspiration, as well as from the 17th century Baroque, from Caravaggio and his followers.
Like many, I have obviously been influenced by the cultural broth in which I was born and raised, so my conceptions of religion and reality have matured as a slow work of deconstruction of apparently immovable and never questioned dogmas, decalcification of mental articulations, fixed only on certain movements, exclusively reactive and involuntary.
It is therefore inevitable that every now and then they release residues of the inebriating aroma of incense, breathed in as a child at the nuns' nursery school, in the parish serving mass and forcefully swallowed with apparent carelessness in the compulsory school, concordat and well equipped with crucifixes.
After many years of "random" research, here appears a host of priestesses, vestals, pythias, sacred dancers, angelesses, witches and fortune tellers, who stop burning on the pyres of the Inquisition and rise to a role of guide towards a new concept of spirituality - all rigorously haloed - represented as symbols guaranteeing the operation of demolition of the moral wall existing between what since the advent of Christianity has been understood negatively as matter, sexuality, fertility, flesh and that is the "Impurous" and the "Pure", ideas, asceticism, spiritual elevation, hatred for the body and the flesh.
The world of the Suspended Saints is one where the heavenly Paradise is demystified and lived as much as possible in the reality of this life, where a new inner awareness is reached without having to give up hedonistic pleasure; where God is replaced by a Nirvana that can be reached by flaunting one's naked beauty. An epicurean protest of sensuality demanding a dignity denied for millennia by a patriarchal chieftain's chauvinism, which fearing female sexual power, reduces women to an object on which to impose exclusive dominion. Sometimes to avoid competition with other males, sometimes basing one's illusion of power on such predatory competition, which requires and imposes the cult of female virginity, not as temporary spiritual hygiene, but as an exclusive guarantee of one's primacy, of the continuation of the lineage and of one's psychic power.
Alongside these improper lay priestesses, mindful of my long past as a mask maker, every now and then there appears the celebration of what remains of the Saturnalia, “pagan” residues that have come down to us as carnival celebrations, tolerated albeit with suspicion since the ancient Roman ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is a new Dionysian scenario of intoxication, sensuality and magic, close to instincts and therefore feared: the nocturnal Sarabands of the Demonic Zanni, from which derive the masks, the cerretani and the acrobats, the carnival and the masks of the Commedia dell’Arte, Molière, Gozzi and Goldoni not to mention the many good and brilliant interpreters who since the 17th century have pulled the carts of comedians and trod the boards of traveling theaters and large theaters. They all represent and keep alive a world and a frontier culture, which does not conform, which does not lower its head in front of the power of ascetic ideals, but which remains anchored to the world and its matter, sometimes tragicomic like the atavistic hunger of the Zanni, of Harlequin and of Pulcinella.
THE “SANTE” IN HALF
The strong, psychically mature, wise and satisfied human being says: know and experience instincts and passions, but do not become a slave to them. Use them and moderate them with the use of reasoning, only in this way will you enter into communion with life and the world.
Some, however, beings or weak or thanatophilic, neurotic, afraid of the world and of themselves said to themselves: abhor instinct, flesh and matter. Elevate yourself to the world of ideas, of the spirit and of God, otherwise you will become like a beast, you will be condemned, after death you will be excluded from paradise and you will go to hell.
The first wanted to recognize paradise on earth for what is granted by the immanent world. The others wanted to live a hell on earth in order to be able to access, after death, the transcendent paradise.
It is perhaps this aspiration to live more fully that is very often frustrated in the lives of many of us, sometimes due to our personal nature, sometimes by atavistic and obscure fears or inhibitions that have nested within us.
From such reflections come these images of women suspended halfway between contradictory psychophysical sensations and experiences, sometimes mysterious or mystical.
Starting from iconographic traces of the Christian-Catholic tradition, the Saints, suspended between ecstasy and orgasm, experiment with new worlds, new symbols, new religions, new ways of approaching the absolute and the new awareness that derives from it.
Perhaps a tantric path in which pleasure and pain mix inexorably to reach the "e-static state", mystical ecstasy suspension, sometimes astonished.
Mystical love and sexual act, communion between earth and sky, like two sides of the same coin, inseparable and indistinguishable.
Here lust, a word whose meaning takes on a morally negative connotation in the post-Hellenistic West, is transformed into an almost meditative state, through the total unleashing of the senses and the most powerful instinctive vital forces inherent in the ancestral depths of the human being. These “saints” try to reach the inner void and the awareness that derives from it, unleashing the instinct, the generative and regenerative sexual power released by the coccygeal energy center at the base of the spine.
Regeneration understood as healing. A therapeutic path of liberation that sometimes passes through the experience of the sacred prostitutes, practicing in the sacred precincts of the ancient destroyed Greco-Roman temples, with their beautiful statues in the image of the ancient gods, from the iconoclastic and mortifying fury of the flesh, from the victorious deniers of the Olympian multiplicity.
Sacred whores then as we moderns might say, holy whores finally, if I may say so.
In this constraint, repression, contraction of the experience of instincts to which the culture of monotheistic religions has forced us, outbreaks of neurosis arise, so serious as to become mental illness. Hence the therapeutic aspect of certain images, in which some subjects lend themselves to undergoing murky sado-masochistic experiences, where pleasure mixes with and requires the accompaniment of physical pain, as justification and expiation for the guilt of having a body and enjoying. Here the materials abound: the innumerable Christian martyrs and the female martyrs with which the calendar is marked are an inexhaustible source of inspiration, starting with Saint Sebastian reinterpreted in a feminine key, to Giordano Bruno, heretic, tortured and burned; self-mutilation of a reactionary and obscurantist caste, but aware of its own convenience. From the beautiful images of the film starring the great Gian Maria Volontà, in the last moments of his life, under torture, we see how he locked himself in an ecstatic trance to be able to bear the physical pain of the terrible tortures to which he was subjected. If Bruno was considered a heretic, a magician and a necromancer, even these half-or suspended saints are witches with magical powers (the Pythias and the Sibyls) deriving from the knowledge of the secrets of the depths of the earth, known to the ancient Celts; the chthonic forces of nature, of the great mother earth. Hygeia and Demeter are associated with them among the Hellenes.
2009 - S.B.