"Why did you choose to be an actor? »To this question, I often answer (and it is not only a joke!): "my parents led me to". Yolande, my mother, wanted to be a dancer; she had to give this up: good education implied that. Pio had to take his advanced vocational certificate of engineer before he could say: "now I am an artist". He chose painting, but it could have been theatre, which he liked above all (he practised as an amateur); his work is amply inspired and imprinted with it, scattered with theatrical images and crowds of characters, a kind of austere commedia dell' arte, tragic and surrealistic, essentially based on his youth memory, imagination and unconscious. A passionate, playful and rebellious youth, up to torment.
His uprooting and the anguishes which accompanied it aroused this need for telling and recreating the visions of a childhood and an adolescence that continued to live in him with the force of memory and dream. He knew the magic of the glance and the gesture; from his eye to his hand, life passed, recomposed with an infinite refinement: the one that leads from emotion to creation. As a real craftsman he knew in his entire being that man controls life and recreates it with his heart, his body and his spirit up to sublimation, and that he had to do it with purity, love and freedom. This deep sense of freedom and fairness led him to take risks and fight for HIS trueness: the Independence of art towards money, merchants, fashions, fakes and arrangements. He paid dearly for it to leave us a unique, necessary and irreplaceable work that finds its modernity and its universality with time, an authentic, true, subtly and deeply controlled work. His “painted theatre”, between dream and reality, between feeling and thought, gets us in uncommon regions of the intelligence and heart. Pierre Santini (1991).

Emerging from adolescence, I lived several months with a troupe, some pseudo-intellectual artists, born during the barricades. I remember that during a dinner, one of them, certainly appointed to the "debate" of the evening, asked me in a self-important way: "What about you, Mario, who is the greatest painter...? "As I looked astounded, he specified: "... Well... I mean... who is your favourite painter? "Without any hesitation, I then answered: "My father". Everyone seemed petrified... What...! Me, a “May 68” boy I dared to declare in front of professionals of the artistic Intellect that I prefered a traditional figurative painter to all those marvellous works by Fernand Leger, Soutine, Bazaine, Delaunay or even Picasso (well, not all the periods...!!). That evening, I lost all my credibility with these people. However, I hope that they will be there, for the private view of the exhibition that your sons and your friends have wanted to offer you, and that they will have matured enough to understand, or at least to tolerate, when seeing your works, that my favourite painter, is always you DAD.