The poetry of Ernani Costantini – A message of love *            
                     
    by Enzo Di Martino            
                     
                     
    Thirty years of artistic research have provide the opportunity for an evaluation which may even be definitive for an artist.
Therefore this exhibition held at the San Vidal Art Centre – which in fact documents thirty-two years’ work – could appear an irreversibly conclusive statement in the life of a painter.
If it wasn’t for the fact that it is precisely in this exhibition that Ernani Costantini breaks with this blinkered view as he has always done anyway, over the course of his now lengthy artistic career – presenting at its conclusion a collection of works dedicated to the Song of Songs (from which the series of three splendid lythographs with a forward by Nantas Salvalaggio is also taken) which indicate the new opening through which Costantini manages to flee from any definitive conclusions once more.
In this sense Costantini appears to be one of the most unusual among the painters from the Venetian area because, over the course of the years, he has always had the restlessness and the energy to force the multiple experiences encountered in order to exceed the limits and charter new pathways to be followed.
It is a game of taking in and then moving on which Costantini began when he was very young with his esteemed masters – Ercole Sibellato and Mario Disertori – and which he has continued when encountering both the “Mediterranean classicism of the twentieth century” and the “bright and rather superficial colours” of the “petits maîtres” of Venice.
The truth is that Costantini has has put down roots in much deeper ground and “adores” the Tuscan Renaissance, and was profoundly struck, in 1941, by the fascinating charm of the gentle colour tones used by Giambattista Tiepolo.
It is important to bear this point in mind in order to understand how although his intellectual curiosity has often driven him towards past experiences already consolidated, it has also distanced Costantini from other, equally important movements underway at the time such as neocubism in postwar Venice.
In fact, up until the mid-fifties Costantini proceeded with passionate and free steps at a pace, almost afraid of being definitively pinned down to one artistic strategy. It is true that he painted The Newspaper Seller (1953-54) in which the cubist/futurist influence is apparent but already the following year, in the Annunciation he attempted a personal combination of the “airy lightness” of venetian painting and the dramatic “cubist strokes” of the painting style fashionable at the time.
“All this – writes Rizzi in his splendid and exhaustive presentation – may give the impression of an artist who has not yet made his own precise choice”. The truth is, as Costantini himself explains immediately after that “in culture, as in life, nothing is acquired, but rather everything is in continuous flux”.
It is a question of a moral stance, before even an artistic one, which Costantini has cultivated not only in the search for his own personal artistic connotation but also and above all, perhaps in the search for his identity as a man.
If by chance it should be necessary to identify a re-current theme in the life and work of Costantini, this appears to be the sense of Christianity (rather than of religiousness) which permeates both his entire works and his personality.
It is then from this deeply felt source that his sacred still life works spring forth, the soft gentleness of his mother and child images, and his peaceful and contemplative vision of things and of men.
It is naturally from this strong and undeniable emotion that the great frescoes of sacred inspiration were created, made especially for churches which are places of worship.
This Christian inspiration leads him to idealise and adorn with modesty and naturalness even his more recent nudes, in an attempt, not only of artistic creation, but to transmit to others a unique and universal message of love.
   
                     
      Enzo Di Martino            
                     
                     
    *^ Il Gazzettino, Venice, 26 September 1980    
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
                             
                             
  © Famiglia Costantini