THE SUFFERING MUSE
edit by Duccio Trombadori

I don’t know the music composed by Renato Meneghetti but I can try to imagine it starting out from the silent, highly vibrating effect emanating from the images of his works. A certain dynamism inside the vision involves us in front of a series of painted X-rays, emulsified and pigmented paintings, alcohol-treated paper, thermoshaped plastic and other materials put under the pressure of premeditated and aggressive manipulation. It is at this stage that the sound effect can indeed coincide with the most precious effect of visual art in a sensation similar to detachment from temporality. This is due to the atony which is in itself already music yet still intimately linked to a potentiality bound to the image beyond the rhythm, movement and sound. By looking down deeply into such a similar effervescent diorama where the feeling of irritation is even accentuated by a manual and aesthetic versatility it is possible to rediscover the character of an intimate, dissolving and perhaps desperate youthful sweetness. Meneghetti is dominated by a sentimental yet robust impulse which explodes even within the intricate weave of such experimental planning where everything depends on the visual techniques adopted. In this overly excited modelling of the human cry it does not seem, however, that desperation has won out.

The subject does not lose the thread of his consciousness and does not disintegrate into the fine dust of sensation. Meneghetti’s expressive mimicry is the offspring of the narcotizing poetics of decadent, accablée modernity. It is not to be confused with the proud and pure aesthetic element. Indeed it presupposes the redemption of the same as it advances with the expository rhythm of a teratology abounding in moral meanings. In the complete disarray of expressive genres and in the almost obsessive search for identity between sensation and representation, Meneghetti seems to meet the ancient demands of the dance of death and the initiation procedures of the mediaeval and pre-Renaissance triumphs of death. Here mortification of the flesh celebrated its glory in the moment of greatest enchantment brought about by deceiving sensuality. That is to say, it occurred in the middle of closed gardens in flower, among ladies bedecked in jewels and knights in love. These paradises of vanity were ready to undergo the destiny of corruption which was as necessary as it was unforeseeable.

Beyond the symbol and allegory, however, Renato Meneghetti has encountered above all his own self. He has preferred to proceed in his investigation of the meagre existential dimension of posthumous man. This degenerated type of mankind in modern industrial society had already been poetically anticipated in all his imploring misery by Baudelaire when this poet laid his heart bare and by Rimbaud during his infernal illuminations. Because of this, more than the form, Meneghetti alludes to and evokes though his work what is destined to escape it in essence, that is, life, its mysterious, blood flow, its ancestral irreducibility to a cautious, reasonable human measure.

The mystical tract of a similar position joins up with the energetic demand for an entire production of images which are not satisfied with static solutions or turned to condense into the object every possible meaning of aesthetic operation. The anxieties of an entire generation are mirrored here — Meneghetti is fifty-two years old — whose rites and myths had a common denominator in an iconoclastic vocation in the meaning of protest against values, conventions and social habits. The result of this is a complex vocabulary which does not limit itself to preaching the reduction to zero of meanings or expressive codes. On the contrary, a manipulative facility, a modelling capacity for gesticulation and an almost tactile adherence to the tangible moment has placed Meneghetti on the road towards an experimentation which would not easily have contained all the data of a freed vitality.

He has been a designer in advertising, producer of objects for the internal decorating industry. He still develops architectural plans. He paints, photographs, shoots 16 mm films, composes music, does theatre, sculpts and creates expressive situations with his own body which he then videos. His Radiografie treated with fine chromatic dust inform us that his exhausting hunt for the ‘total’ art form is far from over. Indeed by following the route opened by Meneghetti’s images we can easily detect the most intimate sign of a biography. There are the indications of an offended life and the typical behaviour of a European at the end of a century where the essence of nihilism seems to have chosen the comfortable bedstead of a ‘lightness’ dissolving every relationship between words and things. In this way it is possible to explain the usual adoption of the mask instead of the face and the taste for speaking in code because of an insuppressible existential necessity. Likewise we can explain the loss of a recognisable identity as an attempt to safeguard to power of having one in the future so as not to waste a virtue still to be placed on trial and put to the test. Gottfried Benn has written unforgettable pages on the ‘double life’ of the modern Western phenotype in analogy with Junger’s thoughts regarding the ‘passage through the wood’ as a rule for survival.

By no chance does the idea of clandestineness exert such much influence of modern man in the condition of the greatest informative ‘transparency’ communicating in the relationships between bodies, individuals and social systems. The modern tragedy of appearance poses limiting questions on the visual arts putting them back into discussion in the light of their statutes and ends. Meneghetti endures the weight of such a condition by adopting the strategy of metamorphosis and self-satisfaction. He thus obtains an iridescent and almost epithelial description of the human situation. The face is identical to itself just as the body presents itself in its self-masking and perceptions as an object of clinical arrangement or the result of physiological decomposition.

This in turn, in the case of his Radiografie, suggests the existential anonymity of the kind precipitating from death into life. From these Radiografie which constitute Meneghetti’s most recent passage of his imagining energy, a desperate visual vitality is powerfully projected onto the human problem of the knowing anxiety contained in ‘being for death’ about which Heidegger speaks. Passing through the X-rays you can see knees, shoulders, foreheads, eye sockets, groins, chins, jaw bones, craniums and cervical columns. They are all traced out in varying passages of colour which sometimes enter into conflict with each and at times blend in with each other in inviting, allusive combinations (yellow, violet and amaranth). The dimension of luminous transparency is strongly defined. It is at the same time a naturalistic datum and an allusion to the transcendental or overwhelming element. It is the vanishing fury of ‘finite’ existence. His technique is too human a gift not to end up limited by the clarifying rationality of the moment. In this very moment, however, there is a component which is difficult to capture. The artist’s endeavour lies in this very ‘attempt of the conscious finite to reach the infinite’. Capturing the ‘horizon of silence’ within ‘the simulacra of appearance’ is the most ambitious of ambitions.

Meneghetti has understood this only too well for a long time. His work has no other aim than this. By placing himself as the possibility of freedom between technique (both communicating and expressive in nature) and the temporal dimension he endures the unavoidable checkmate of man and aesthetic experience in the attempt to mimic pure creation. The state of permanent uneasiness and apparent existential frenzy emanating from his images does not correspond or limit itself to the need to represent social malaise or to the demand for visualising the obvious crisis of western cultural models.

There is a pre-social level which, I dare say, is almost biological, primary or primordial, and which polarises the attention and the expressive tension of the artist. Here sensation dialogues with some instinctive warnings and the attempt to go beyond consciousness with an overestimation of pure perceptiveness appears as obvious while the artist considers himself as an object of observation. He is mutant, changeable and grotesquely playful as he winks to his observer. He is like a sad mask, Pierrot Lunaire in an infinite dejection, poor in his presumption, prisoner of his own rational and intuitive defences. In the autobiographical and monographic drama put on show in Meneghetti’s work the emphasis is not placed on the individual drama at hand. The drama of the single person becomes an adventure regarding the genre. The fairly open parable of nulla salus seen here as a message emerging from the images, comes out as the inevitable internal truth of an artistic position. Meneghetti’s glance is directed at the human body and has the superb philosophical distance of Foucault’s eye while he was noting down ‘in the void of the disappeared man’ the discursive systems, the relationships of power and the irremediable separation of consciousness and truth of life.

The philosophical expressiveness of Meneghetti’s work illustrates the famous battle against time which art is knowingly destined to lose. This occurs in a sort of permanent mimesis of the life-death dynamic implicit in every type of poetic language. There is an involving continuity in the entire journey which the artist has made until today which only on the surface might be reduced to that of an aesthete of experimentation. His usage of language and communication techniques is only the varying disguise of the one dominant thought. In Meneghetti this thought becomes stronger and stronger as the guiding principle of a moral genealogy figured and modelled through an excessive vital fervour. One of his esteemers once correctly pointed out his need to ‘act on life before it becomes death’. Indeed, if we observe the plurality of his interventions — from the Monotipi at the end of the Sixties right through to the ‘fagocitatrici’ figures, the series of estranging and communicative figures (from the theatre to video) and the Radiografie — we realise that the artist acts upon the one profound poetic stimulus. In the constant body to body combat between fleeting life and the physical-psychic links of its passing, indelible traces are deposited which must be documented and reproduced with careful observation. In this merciless self-analysis Meneghetti’s expressive message is refined. Here the ‘mutant’ affirms his basic sincerity in the choice of exhibiting his own mask-like identity.

The tremendous and perverse tendency to disguise one’s own condition, to tarry with language in the plight of living dialectics is not an act made in public for pure self-satisfaction. It makes us aware, instead, of the need to tell the ‘truth’ and rely on our fragile human instruments. In the variously coloured consistency with which Meneghetti has respected the need for expression, there is the moral content of a work which, inasmuch as it is a work, takes on a physiognomy which cannot be assimilated to the ‘lightness’ of the prevailing tastes of the followers of modernism. Not by chance does Meneghetti live on the fringe of the art world and its ‘system’. He takes on its forms in small doses and discreetly spaces out his own appearances in public. This way of keeping himself apart while being present summarises the poetic sense of someone who loves to look far beyond the low profile of current decadence. His position is anything but cynical. It is, instead, rich in life and hope, even over the line of ‘no hope’. It is the originality of such a glance, which is so isolated and yet so communicative, which points out the rare and precious presence of an authentic style.

Duccio Trombadori