Black Symbolism: the artwork of John Santerineross
If there is one central tenet held by the original Symbolist artists, it is that life is fundamentally mysterious, and artists must both respect and preserve this profound mystery. In both painting and poetry, they insisted on the use of suggestion rather than explicitness, symbols rather than description. Symbolists believed that, “the creation of a mood is as important as the transmission of information; (it must also) seek to engage the entire mind and personality of the viewer by appealing to the viewer’s emotions and unconscious mind, as well as to their intellect”. The Symbolist painters used both mythological and dream imagery; the symbols used by Symbolist artists are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography, but intense personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references.
John Santerineross carries this philosophy one step further, stating that his artwork falls under the art movement of “Black Symbolism”, a term he coined in 1999. Under Black Symbolism, artwork is directly influenced by the darker aspect of the human psyche, the nightmares we try to suppress and the personal demons we all possess within ourselves. While the symbols remain personal and obscure, the focus is on the darker imagery of nightmares as opposed to the traditional dream imagery of the original art movement of Symbolism of the mid 19th century.
Black Symbolism is not confined to the original Symbolist’s principle of showcasing a reflection of life’s mysteries, but instead it also embodies the reflection of the darker side of individuals, the things that haunt us in our daily lives and are quite often spawned from childhood trauma. As children, we are fragile, innocent and malleable. Physical, mental or sexual abuse, abandonment or even the seemingly simple transgression of having non-compassionate parents leave permanent deep, scathing wounds to our psyche, invisible to the naked eye but still very much a part of who we are, becoming our own personal demons dwelling just beneath the surface.
It is John’s belief that theses things all too often influence the people that we become. John’s work manifests those demons living within us, things we all feel in our basic core as human beings. Often times this darkness is subtle, even inconceivable or unable to be explained with logic alone. John’s artwork represents the darker things that we all can relate to on a deep, subconscious level. It is these struggles with the darker side of ourselves that John captures in his photographs.
There are two quotes that John Santerineross is known for that are actually statements that explain his philosophy:
“We are all prisoners of our childhood” and
“Embrace the animal. Strive for the human”
