LOOKING INWARDS, LOOKING BEYOND
edit by Luciano Caramel

Renato Meneghetti is an innovative artist practised in the use of many different media and forms of communication. He dedicated himself to the arts at a very early age; first to painting, then sculpture, photography, music, design, architecture, short and full-length films, videos, performances, stage-managing and the theatre. These different media he mixed, seeking a rapport, osmosis, a merging.

He took great part in the statutory discussions on the ‘next step’ after non-representational art in the Sixties and Seventies, which certainly stimulated him to redefine what constitutes an artist’s work, but did nothing to help others understand his own. It was in the Eighties that his works became more comprehensible, thus allowing a re-interpretation of certain previous ones, which could be evaluated more appropriately in the light of what came afterwards.

Certain monotypes from the period between 1964 and 1966 –1967, when Meneghetti was no more than twenty years old, testify to this inclination towards images which, though non-descriptive, communicate a sense of unease, an alarmed facing up to the reality of psychic intonation, all coming from within; this formed the substance of the more mature works produced at the beginning of the Eighties. Thus we have Dissolversi (1964), in which a shape appears on the left and is repeated many times towards the right, but gradually dissolving, almost as if it were entering another dimension beyond the threshold of corporeality.

Il Giudizio (1965), explicitly recalls the Final Judgement, with the canonic distribution of the chosen few above and the damned below, the two being linked by semi-transparent trajectories, perhaps flames coming up from below, where the sinners are milling around in a symbolic dense tangle. The effect is an almost magnetic tension. Another work, entitled Messaggio “314”, effected in 1967 on sheets of chemical paper, gives an impression of fluctuating ectoplastic concretions; the imprints of type-written letters appear on a dark background, lending the whole a mysterious tone. Interpretations are interesting and unusual — a fusion of linguistic and symbolic communication.

The artist’s very early years produced a series of distressing images, the medium this time being a mixture of collage on wood and painting with acrylics. A dramatic example of this is Cadeva la neve ad Auschwitz (1965), a veritable vision of death. Placed in the centre on the snowy ground is the cut out photograph of a skeletal, naked body — a victim of the concentration camp — smothered in dense, incumbent smoke. Low down, in the foreground, barbed wire runs from left to right. It is a horrifyingly effective vision, a representation of genocide with no attempt at rhetoric, which goes way beyond the repetetive illustrations of much of the new representative art of the time, and denounces, directly and without artifice, man’s barbaric murder of his fellow.
Meneghetti’s desire to convey a meaningful message, this time with regard to the young generation’s protest against the establishment, is again evident in Contestazione in musica (1966), another collage.

A large eye in the centre looks out from the picture, scrutinizing and almost drawing the observer in towards itself with the hypnotic effect of the concentric circles which surround it. All around this great eye figures and scenes of musical events are scattered over the surface. It is a central theme which, like a spring that cannot be damned, re-emerges in the Eighties in a series of more synthetic, less tense découpages on cloth-lined paper, in which cut out images of faces or other appear as if floating in an allusive, indeterminate spatiality.
In the same period Meneghetti returned to doing monotypes, creating great faces or busts with a corroded appearance, as if victims of a nuclear war, which emanate a sense of the sinister.

We now broach a new phase in which the artist tests out the medium of X-rays, with alcohol-based paint on a pigmented canvas, or acrylic paints on an emulsified canvas. He gradually dedicates himself exclusively to this, and reproposes, within the context of new representational art, an inner reality of strictly psychic intonation, in only apparent contrast with the objectiveness of the scientific procedure employed. Due to the effect of invisible radiation, what appears, whether on uniform backgrounds or ones which have been treated, allows us to see inside man, beneath his external wrappings, extracting a fundamental essence. This is manipulated by the artist in such an expressive way — not necessarily a complex way, rather simple decisions regarding positioning — that the message is transferred to another dimension. A dimension which, with its respect for practical reality, for detail, and for the theme treated, renders the message absolute, giving it a material substance consenting life and even outlasting it, at least temporarily, until the final process of pulverization to which everything is destined and which the skeleton, stripped of its flesh, preconizes.

A sort of memento homo, therefore, a denunciation of vanitas, full of reminders of the first and last meaning, of life and death, of the nature of human being.
The jaws, teeth, forearms, hands, skulls, pelvises, spines and every other part of the skeletons are caught up in an aura which goes beyond the human senses, and brings us back to coordinates which something incomprehensible enables the human eye or mind to perceive. This alone involves an opening up to a dimension other than that of mechanical, tactile, perception-based determinism, and augments rather than limits the power of Meneghetti’s images, avoiding, as he wrote himself, ‘the limitations of the funereal epigraph or of purely scientific finds’. With active intervention, obviously, not with the simple use of scientific means, obtaining results which are much more far-reaching than those of his early attempts.

Nor is Meneghetti’s work limited strictly to expressive, pictorial art. It acts on a metaphorical level too, it involves the transposing of meaning which is inherent in art, implicit in transferring an X-ray onto canvas, treating it and relating it to other works and materials.
It is removed, therefore, from the passive, shallow sterility of many other artists’ images, especially those of young artists. Meneghetti should not really be grouped with the latter, because although both he and they deal with ‘elementary’ images — images of life and death, and often violence — in their case these amount to no more than a tautological, mainly naturalistic documentation. Nor does the artist make use of the process of enlargement — so efficient in advertising at creating an impact in urban surroundings — typical of the images of the expert Oliviero Toscani, for example. His photographs have a short-term impact as they are inextricably tied to a present-day theme which makes them so appropriate at the time.

Meneghetti’s works have a long-term effect, a quality which is characteristic of art, even when rooted in the hardest and most ‘final’ of existentialist themes. Countless examples of past works could be cited, from a Grünewald to a Michelangelo, a Caravaggio, a Goya, but, remaining within the contemporary, one has only to think of Andres Serrano’s cibachromes on the theme of the Morgue. Here the corpses are always removed from the context of their surroundings, they are only shown in their isolation and never in their totality. The artist’s images are subject to his own personal intervention; by various means he renders them emblematic rather than illustrative, differentiating them, that is, from a simple recording of events, like the news report. This is also possible (and this is an observation which can be used for Meneghetti) due to the absolute nature, in its constitutive absence of temporality, of the pictorial image (or photographic image).

Of course the effective, not potential, succession of the photograms of a film or a video can have a very emotive effect on the spectator, who finds himself involved on an emotional level by the dynamics of what is happening in front of him. At the same time the events occur at a particular pace which cannot be arrested or controlled without a certain amount of damage. Undoubtedly this is an extremely powerful means of communication, and one which Meneghetti has tested out himself many times. But every medal has its reverse. Paradoxically, painting, since it is based on immobility, on the arresting of the future in one exemplary moment, allows, in its partiality, greater personal intervention; painting goes beyond and arrests the temporality which usually brings us to connect the cinema — despite its diversity of course — with the reality of events around us. This is where the strength of pictorial art lies, it is a complement rather than an alternative to cinema, as our artist’s Radiografie, in which Cesare Brandi’s theory of ‘astanza’ is reproposed, exemplify.

Luciano Caramel