X-RAYS OF A DESTINY
edit by Gillo Dorfles

At times a simple technical fact or a serious existential event can cause the detonation of an artistic form hidden latent in the depths of the conscious or subconscious mind.
In the case of Meneghetti it was actually a technical device plus a crucial event that set off an explosion in his activity that, prior to that point, had wavered between differing creative efforts: from collage to design and sculpture to painting, a true “stylistic constancy” refused to emerge. But from the eighties a new phase began that led him to what has become the dominant feature of almost his entire output.

What happened? Firstly, an episode that was in itself dramatic and could have marred the life of one of his daughters: the little girl of four has been a victim of a serious accident. Only energy, despair, faith in therapy and consulting the most renowned specialists in Italy and America managed to solve that critical problem.
Moreover, before recovery was complete endless x-rays were taken for the numerous examinations and check-ups which, day-by-day, month-by-month, plotted out the healing process. And so it was that Meneghetti found himself face to face with a series of images - evanescent though “speaking” and evocative of atmospheres, characters, landscapes - that were almost embryonic forms yet to be developed. A new creative phase unfolded for him.
Elaborating the x-ray - enlarged, transferred onto sensitised canvas and transformed into autonomous paintings using alcohol-based inks - led to a remarkable series of works in which the artist’s personality dominates the aleatory nature of the primitive x-ray, giving it totally new meanings which only his imagination could reveal.

It was not enough to make use of the texture of the x-ray film to create a self-contained work. But it was, and still is in the most recent works, essential to “uncover” those iconological elements that are elusive at first but lie hidden within the light and shade of the plate.
Now that the x-ray is widely used in many art forms and in advertising, the technique adopted by Meneghetti no longer creates surprise or scandal. It must also be recognised that he was undoubtedly among the first, if not the very first, to see the aesthetic rather than scientific interest in this medium, and above all to detect the deeper meanings in its use. Indeed it is not possible to fully appreciate his work without bearing in mind the events recalled above. This explains such an early use (1979) of this technique as the foundation for his work. And indeed every one of these x-rays provided the stimulus from which the artist could, and can, draw highly imaginative inspiration.

The primitive “plate” is in turn transformed into portrait, abstract composition, landscape, mountain chain, seascape etc…
In each case the very colours “added” to the evanescent photographic texture acquire a naturalistic and at times a decorative quality, allowing Meneghetti to create situations that are historical, news related, familiar, political etc…
For example in the fascinating “Autoritratto al chiaro di luna ” the x-ray of the skull is transformed into the night satellite. In the “Ritratto di Gengis ” the x-ray of the pelvis becomes a lugubrious, imperious face, or in “Ritratto di Rocky ” a pelvis is transformed into a skull, hips into wrists and these, overlapping, replace the eyes. And what can be said of “Ritratto di Erich in Marocco ” where the x-ray image of knees creates a decidedly tropical atmosphere.

An intestinal diverticulum is used in “Ritratto di Maria Pia sotto la pioggia ” while “Ritratto di Maximilian a Haiti ” is nothing more than an x-rayed pelvis with wide open “eyes” staring into the void. The fact that there is an “organic” element at the basis of each of these works – a dental arch, the coccygeal-femoral articulation, the skull, the thorax, the intestinal tract, or even the skeleton of a bird or a plant – is of no more than “historical” or documentary importance. The x-ray really becomes an intimate memory, a recollection, sensations drawn from nature, from the sea, and is now “public” heritage despite completely private origins such as that of the artist’s daughter, or - a recurrent theme – the artist’s own body and those of his friends who have let themselves be “x-rayed”.
Something needs to be said at this point regarding the “pictorial” value of these works that are naturally limited by the use of sensitised canvas as a support and alcohol-based colour as a chromatic medium.

Though these limits are at times evident they have a beneficial “breaking” effect, forcing the artist to act within the boundaries of his medium even if the most effective works are where the painted elements are clearest and the x-ray texture is more deformed and less recognisable. This also applies to some of the more recent works where the ultrasonogram is used rather than the usual x-ray; being, because of its technical peculiarity, less clean-cut and outlined, more cloudy and evanescent than x-ray. Here crepuscular landscapes, trees and sunsets of unusually persuasive pictorial lyricism can be “identified”.

At a time when the visual arts face the dilemma of whether to abandon the traditional idea of painting and reduce their field exclusively to performance, installation, collages and so on, Meneghetti’s work allows him to overcome the boundaries of the abstract and figurative, of video and photography, to use a medium that scientific discovery and contemporary technique have made possible, and to operate individually in a field where technical devices and nature can once again cohabit and co-operate.

It could of course be underlined at this point that patches on the wall where Leonardo saw mysterious figures or inkblots in Rorschach’s tests provide us with the aleatory, accidental sketches from which future paintings could be born. This indeed could be said of every art form, not just of painting. How often has a rhythm, a sound, a single word been the embryo of a poetic, literary or musical work? This then is also true of Meneghetti.

There is however one substantial difference: behind these images, so unusual and disturbing, the dramatic presence of a pre-existing nucleus always lies, belonging to an individual, an animal – bird, fish – in any case belonging to the surrounding natural world, not created exclusively by mechanical stimulus. The danger could lie in fossilising the imagination by directing it towards one single image - or let us say “mythopoeic”- source. However this does not occur as the artist has expressed himself earlier in many different modes, in design, sculpture, music etc…

I believe that the x-ray in this case has had a primary role stemming from a tangibly consuming, dramatic phase of the artist’s life, a phase that was, unwittingly, the matrix of an exceptionally intense process.

Gillo Dorfles