ENZO SANTORO

CONTEMPORARY PAINTINGS

Artist Statement

In my work I am interested in exploring poetics and order in nature. I attempt to create formal paintings with analogies to music such as rhythm, harmony, tonality and counterpoint. These reflect the movements and moods evocative of the landscape.  Informed by Christian Theology, Islamic Art and Architecture, Modern Art and Aboriginal Desert Painting, my art making explores the tensions and relationships between image and abstraction, object and symbol, Order and Chaos, formality and expression. I prefer to evoke rather than describe to allow an open communication through my work. I am particularly influenced by painters of light and structure who create contemplative works, such as  Hokusai, Morandi, Diebenkhorn, Rothko and Callum Innes. My paintings are made by staining the canvas with successive washes to achieve depth and luminosity through colour and tonal modulation. Geometric structure underlies and contains a multitude of incidences. This process reflects my vision of nature as infinitely variable within a given structure that reveals a divine order.  

Enzo Santoro by Marie Geissler

‘Enzo Santoro’s paintings are harmonious impressions of the natural world that draw from his fascination with nature, its, forms, textures and light. He draws inspiration from an intimate knowledge of the work of Georgio Morandi and Mark Rothko creating luminous tactile surfaces that like theirs express a delicate sensuality and optically compelling vibrancy. In Santoro’s expression however, meaning is generated using a vocabulary of  linear geometries  that seem at once to be both coming into being, but also disappearing. Visible and invisible are delicately balanced. Yet such is the skill in his subtle orchestration of tone that his compositional balance communicates a unity and stillness, a meditative reality that transcends time and place.’                                              by Marie Geissler

Exhibition Preview guest speaker  Nick Vickers Co-ordinator, Alumni Relations, C.O.F.A.

The subtle shift in colours that underlie Enzo Santoro's paintings are the key to understanding this artist's commitment to painterly abstraction. We look at these works that present themselves as being seemingly restful, yet below the picture plain there is a turbulence that evokes a jazz-like visual acknowledgement of textural sounds.

Lines and bars of silent abstraction resonate through the room, Above the din of clinking glasses, above the traffic And cacophony of our daily thoughts.A space for contemplation,A place where there is space to inhale some visual cadences.