…those implications of Saturno’s pictures look like grotesquely ironic to an unexperienced observer, but they are references to the sacred art. In fact, the precision of the geometry, the obsessive centeredness and symmetry in the portraits, the ceremony and the monumentality of his pictures refer to the tragic iconographic tradition of western christian art. The suffering he portrays is not a mere ambiguous fetish game, it goes far beyond the sado-masochist side, it goes into a kind of “secular ecstasy”, joy of the soul paid by pain of the body. He paints pictures of “passion”, like that one peculiar to many christian saints and martyrs, portrayed during the moment of their sublime mystical pleasure obtained physical torture of the flesh.

Devis Granziera