NECESSITY OF FEELING, THE POWER OF EMOTION
edit by Francesco Revel - Matteo Smolizza

Renato Meneghetti delves into art because of a necessity of feeling, the power of emotion. He does not bow down to the dictatorship of the means, not does he deliberately privilege painting against music or installations. He chooses, instead, the most efficacious instrument every time his spirit sways.
This happens almost every year. His cycles are as long as it takes him to search into, excavate and exhaust a deep source. His most recent interests regard X-rays. Such scientific endeavour wins back the shadowy, invisible areas of the human body thanks to resonance and transparency. He turns bones into extremely white, almost unique forms amid a gelatinous substance or cloud. Meneghetti, however, does not accept the lesson of the ready-made. He is not one of those artists who undergo the influences moving around them. He, instead, uses the X-ray as a support for his painting. It is, therefore, no different from the cloth, though it is infinitely more hostile and difficult. Any linen cloth has lines and knots. That is, it has a weave which is automatically covered and taken over by the painting. The oil or acrylic or any other material used becomes the exclusive image, the sole visible threshold on which to appreciate the technical ability of the painter or the profundity of his genius. The support is annulled or covered, just like the skeleton under the veil of flesh. The echo emanating from our cranium or hands evokes a feeling of holiness. It elevates our fantasy to the utmost feeling of awe. Because of this for many it is painful to observe their own X-rays.
The mere thought of a fleshless bone or an eye torn from its socket is unbearable, especially when the bone in question is our own. A real bone, for example, a tibia, is identical to the one we lean on every second. The fact is that fleshless bones are the symbol of death. And yet, Meneghetti has decided to return to the white islands of his X-rays with his colours and painting, almost in a bid to increase this very sensation. He touches on the intangible in his presentiment that when the material world is hidden it is identical to thought. Thus his painting, though rather immediate when it flows from his mind down to the brush, is meditated upon at length. It is also expected, coming, as it does, like inspiration from the farthest regions of the Spirit. His works are evocations and prayers at the same time, like ancient rites. They constitute the image of the soul of mankind, of human genius. Their peculiar character, even when it has disappeared and we can no longer reach it, or when it kicks and roars out for recognition, is the same thing.
Let us look at some titles: an extremely wide correct shot becomes the trace and the development of a landscape with emanations of forces from the great sea which gather into smoke, an obsession heavier than nature.
This is the Ritratto di Friedrich a Dover. A different pressure can be noticed in Autoritratto al chiaro di luna. Here the pressure is totally free from smoke and is built up like a free falling stone. They are the X-rays of a cranium three quarters changed to take on new forms with colour and alcohol. They suddenly take on new light as if they were electrified by two wide bands of purple with everything, however, becoming marble, a sculpture. The half bust is then modelled as if it were run over by the fingers more than by the eye. The technique, in fact, invades the full and empty areas, not to mention the varying densities of the engraving screen, with the excess and the imbalance of forces belonging rather to barbarian sculpture. The result is like a stone carved at the beginning of time.
For the more romantic, it is like the night and resurrection of the artist, of the creating self. The light with its own fluidity of forces and memory in turn invades it but only to disappear into the dark background. Sensations abound around man like a resonance. Meneghetti knows all too well that feeling is not confined to the mind experiencing it, but flows like an explosion or a wave around a rock. This is the miracle of Daumier. Meneghetti knows, however, that such extension, such impossibility of confinement, this final battle against physical and spiritual space where night, darkness and the invisible do not represent the loss of the senses but rather their infinite projection, is a battle for life.
Other images of entrails and membranes which in their own nature are light and immediately fall apart at death, become the estuaries of rivers and cascades, the geography of the Gran Canyon shaped over millions of years. They are the ageless maps of the skies coagulated and built up with only one or two forms on jet black backgrounds. They are the portraits and celebration of the immortal Spirit. The shapes of a woman take on, thanks to the registration of X-ray similar to an ideogram, the immobility of a Chinese landscape.

(‘Images from the deep - Renato Meneghetti’s X-rays display and change ‘invisible’ men. The holy, the horrible and immortality as extreme extensions of the senses’, in Quadri & Sculture, no. 31, June 1998)

Francesco Revel