On Saturday 7 October at 6.00 pm the Bonaire Contemporanea gallery in via Principe Umberto, 39 in Alghero inaugurates Piovono Santi, a solo exhibition by Mattia Enna, born in 1981, curated by Mariolina Cosseddu and Ivo Serafino Fenu, among monsters, saints and desecrating processes of excommunications and beatifications . Sanctifying monsters is a practice that is, if not unusual, at least contradictory. Generally, in religious iconography - especially in the Catholic one - monsters and saints are antithetical, they fight with each other with no holds barred. The monsters painted by Mattia Enna – who also draw on this tradition, from medieval bestiaries to the Nordic visionary nature of Bosch, up to our contemporary Middle Ages – often have hybridized forms that are vaguely anthropomorphic, zoomorphic or phytomorphic. In reality, every single monster is the result of an ironic display of the artist's body and soul in a profound and visceral self-analysis from which phobias and idiosyncrasies emerge: a continuous self-portrait without ever actually showing itself. The SantiSubito - which belong to the mostrini family - are instead predestined for sanctification as they are painted on Corrusco backgrounds which refer to the ancient tradition of Byzantine icons, to the Sardinian retables of Gothic-Catalan tradition and to those, much more recent, of Aldo Contini. The artist, with his Saints and Most Holy Ones grouped in an irreverent calendar for 2024 to be published soon, poised between irony and blasphemy, has managed to transform his iconic signs into powerful relational devices, attractors and catalysts of emotions that are sometimes unspeakable but always fatal in binding and making prisoners the unwary owners of the irreverent and not very "sacred" images. Beyond the playful appearance of the performative action, it is, in fact, a sharing ceremony which reveals, in the distribution of parts, the ethical value of a very serious game with high social functionality. Mattia Enna is the magician capable of transforming monsters into saints with the complicity of a recipient who is as compliant as he is aware of a sticky and binding action. If randomness has a dominant role in the choice of the icon to adopt, it is also true that it is up to the voluntary interlocutor to build the story that ensures life and functions of the defenseless image suddenly invested with a narrative that belongs to it only if one is willing to make fiction an act of faith of religious tenor. Thus a real dramaturgy takes place in which everyone undertakes to play an evolving role, valid for further verifications, including the abilities of the blessed, to be proven in daily practice and for which possible confirmations are awaited, also in the future. The ongoing dialectic between the parties then becomes a relational practice capable of reminding us that art is a formidable tool for creating unexpected encounters full of mysterious knowledge.