SPECIMINA MIRABILUM
From a conversation held in Rome in 1999 with Alessia Tartaglia

Alessia Tartaglia

In your artistic output, is painting, a genre linked by definition to manual ability, the fruit of vitalism or of discipline? What is painting for you?

Renato Meneghetti

We do not know how art was born any more than we know how language came into being. We do know, however, what its use has been since the dawn of time. It is clear, for example, that extremely beautiful constructions exist, some are true works of art, but there is hardly a building in the world that was not built for a specific purpose. From the point of view of utility, there was no difference for primitive man between building a hut and producing an image. Huts were made to protect them from rain, wind, sun and the spirits that generated them and images to defend them from these spirits and natural forces which were no less real. In other words, painting and sculpture had magical functions. The image was created therefore, because its evocative power could produce the effect we wanted. This everlasting principle, even the basis of today’s advertising, demonstrates the divine power of painting: painting as a venerated divinity. Clearly now, if I have chosen to tell about what has happened to me the idea springs from some interior necessity. Although I am certainly not, and do not want to be a writer, and dragging my intimate feelings and a ‘nice’ description of my emotions out in literature would be base and indecent; I expect that expressing feelings and considerations (even, perhaps banalities) is something that cannot be avoided.
I have never really been a dreamer. What seems to be a dream for others, the gullible ones, seems as real to me as cheese is to a cat. I was not surprised, then, when Painting appeared to me – black, cloaked in gold and in the night – saying: “My son, you need not be curious nor seek useless worries. What should you care for this is that? It is I you must follow. What do you care if that person is one way or the other, how he behaves or speaks? Your duty will not be to answer for others, you will have to answer for yourself. Why then are you worried? Here: I know everyone and see everything that happens under the sun”. She spoke again showing me the disposition of the arts, handmaidens in the spiritual Rose (sight was first among them, as it is dearest among the senses), the secret structure of the world and the rule of action: “As The Catholic Faith and the Sacred Scriptures teach us, the Father is the supreme origin of all things, the Son the most perfect beauty, the Holy Spirit the most blessed beloved. The Father is the cause of the universe created, the Son is the light in which to perceive the truth, and the Holy Spirit is the fountain from which to drink of happiness”. Telling me then to become a servant of Beauty, to illustrate the Truth, she vanished into the darkness.
The day was a instant in contemplation of the horizon.
The following evening – while the air was fragrant with laurel and lemon – in the dark anchorages of my room an iron gate suddenly opened. An old man with a torch in hand entered slowly into what was, in the twinkling of an eye, a prison.
It was the devil, he was desirable, he told me he came to set me free. As a gift he offered the solution to better accomplish my task.
[When interior words come from the devil, not only do they not have good effects, they also produce bad effects. As well as great barrenness, the soul senses a restlessness like I have felt many other times, when I have suffered great temptations and suffering of various types. It seems as if the soul resists, it is restless, it is afflicted without knowing why, as if what the devil says is not evil but good].
He said: “ deviation is as useful as righteousness, or more useful, seen as it corrects the intellect from the errors induced by habit and it reveals common forms. Indeed in this case too, you must not give up your quest until you have found the cause. In fact he who has understood the ways of nature will more easily observe the deviations. On the other hand, he who has known the deviations will describe the way more precisely”. He then took me by the throat and for thirty years he took me with him, letting me serve painting only during exercise time, like prisoners do: I then understood the deviations that devours men marking out the boundaries of their pigsty – the society in which each one works mechanically – with disgusting dung, money, for each one a fragrance and medicinal herb.
I knew I was a slave and yet I drew poisonous pleasure from it. And to return my sight the devil exacted a horrid tribute. This has opened the way of painting to me again, bringing that eye – that I had for so long, blindly, cast above the line of the horizon – beneath the skin. This is what I have experienced, up until today. And there is nothing in this that can be reduced to vitalism or to discipline: though life cannot exist without vitalism of art without discipline.

A.T.

After having investigated a form for a relatively long number of years, you radically change style, for example from action painting to monotypes, or from Modular painting to x-rays. In short, I think that your painting is heading towards a dematerialisation of the artwork. Is this anorexia of image a social and telematic phenomena or poetic intuition?

R.M.

Schiller gave us an insight into his writing process with a psychological observation even he himself could not explain - though it was certainly unquestionable; he actually confessed to perceiving before and within himself, while preparing to write poetry, not something like a series of images with an ordered causality of thoughts, but rather a musical layout. Always I have sensed such a constant harmonic tension, growing over years and, each time, it has been broken.
My misfortune basically was that when I was full of ideas, in the early years, I was hypnotised by the ideal. This is why I only brought abortions into the world in which, therefore, reality never corresponded to my burning desires… I am often overcome by an inner anguish that I have mistaken the ideal for reality; because I have always sought the invisible rather than experiencing it.
Even my first, rather geometric works were an effort at perceiving the secret structure of things: this is why a came to sequences of forms that disappear or appear - between being and the void - or else transparent images. I often evoke form with a prayer that constantly echoes within me - Come, hidden Mystery / Come, Treasure without name / Come, ineffable Realty – but I possess only the memory of what we have lost and our eye can no longer perceive. I am melancholic, and so it has to be: any consideration on the life of humankind lacking a vein of melancholy is aphonic and out of tune. Melancholy exists because even this man who is speaking has dreamt his youthful fairytale, that old fairytale we all know, a bedtime story for children: “Down there, deep in the woods, he saw an ancient castle where lived a princess… ”

A.T.

But is art, with its countless techniques, a sign of expressive opulence for you? It seems more like the result of an existential catastrophe...

R.M.

When the soul is not allowed to soar to the eternal world of the Spirit, then it falls by the wayside, and delights in images reflected in the clouds, crying over their transience...
Therefore the poet’s existence is an unhappy one: superior to finiteness though not infinite. The poet perceives ideals but lacks the vigour to take them on, the strength to fulfil them in his life.
On the other hand, Desperation is the smallest of our errors.
At times when I pursue forms in vision, like the huntsman chasing a deer by the fountain where the soul yearns, suffering torments all my bones, languor and tiredness take root in all my sinews and fibre. I dive in, seeking a different path, but the waves cast me back further; the docile waters seem to become hard, as if I were pushing my way into stone. Other times, while I wander in the desert seeking a mirage, a current suddenly whips me away; I am in the air, as if in fire. The air oppresses me like a fiery mountain, hits my skin and dries it out, slides down my throat and scorches it, it presses on top of me and crushes me and I feel as if my eyes are about to spurt out of my head, that my head is about to burst away from my body, that my body might swell and dilate and explode into a thousand pieces. A river then appears in the distance and I feel as if my body is covered in scales almost like a salmon, and the earth and grass around me. I desperately stretch my nose towards the river, and jump, I jump and jump even under that mountain of air. I can jump up high but not forward, towards life: and yet I jump, because with each jump I can still see the waves glitter and the waters rippling and breaking. My figure then appears before me, imperious, with flaming eyes. Be calm – it says – be still, my beloved. Let the river run. Forget the muddy banks, the sandy bed where the shadows dance green and murky, and the dusky wave solitary sings. I am the murderer of myself, half of me has taken away my entire life: a life that still had, among its ugly defects, the promise of beauty, ending each time in such a frightening way, that circle of visions that has always repeated my existence.
But I never forget, as Wilde, that the objective of art is to reveal art without revealing the artist, because in a certain way the artist should create the image including nothing of his own life and it is a real, wretched disgrace that art today should be seen like a form of autobiography, when we are nothing compared to a painting: no doubt Caravaggio must have been envious of his paintings, while he was consumed they were immortal, because every minute that passes takes something from the author giving something to the canvass.
The idea that the artist’s biography is of importance comes from the romantics, first and foremost from Schopenauer. He accepts the contrast between the subjective and the objective as a valuable principle in the arts, but such a contrast is inconsistent, because the subject, the individual who seeks and pursues his own selfish ends, can only be seen as an adversary and not the origin of art. But the subject, being an artist, is already freed from his individual will, becoming what we might call a medium, through which the one subject, as it truly is, celebrates its freedom from appearance. Because this must to be clear to us, for our humiliation and exaltation: the entire comedy of art is not represented for us, for our edification and education, we are in no way the true creators of the world of art; on the contrary we may suppose to be, for the true Creator of art, artistic images and projections, and to achieve our maximum dignity in the significance of a work of art – because it is only as aesthetic phenomena that existence and the world can be eternally justified. All our knowledge of art in the end is completely illusory, because to our perception we are not one and the same with the Being who, as Creator and spectator of the comedy of art, derives eternal enjoyment. Therefore it is only in the act of artistic creation that genius blends with the world’s primary artist, grasping something of the essence of art: in that manner he is marvellously similar to the disturbing fairytale image, turning his eyes back and looking at himself; at the same time he is subject and object, poet, actor and spectator (Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy”). And for this reason I feel well only when I am painting. Then I forget all the unhappiness of life, all the suffering; I am with my thoughts, I feel happy… such impetus cannot be anything but divine vocation. I did not choose my career as a painter myself: on the contrary it is a consequence of my whole individuality and my deepest aspiration.
But the greatest struggle for each one of us is against himself and my mother’s first milk was my butcher, the man who prefers possession to submission, vice to purity, noise to silence, action to contemplation, life to death. He has poisoned every moment of my existence, but I know by now – because I have seen, smelled and touched hell – that anger, jealousy, greed, longing or falsehood are signs of imperfection and obstacles to the revival of the spiritual senses. And whosoever wishes to tread the path towards perfection has the duty to fight against these defects, which are part of human nature: so that when he appears before me, fierce because I make his arms my own, I steadfastly forgive, and for him this is the greatest pain. And now forgive me if when I speak, I sometimes forget that I am speaking with you… as if enamoured of my own voice, of the succession of memories which appear to me and dominate me...

A.T.

The ‘conceptual’ striving that started from Leonardo and continues up to Lucio Fontana persists in your work. Do you feel part of that line?

R.M.

But do you think that there is no ‘conceptual striving’ in the extraordinary cover of the Book of Lindisfarne (a work from Northumbria, dated 698 I think), or in the more or less contemporary preface to the “Ars Grammatica” by Boniface? Or do you believe that Reni and Caravaggio, Manzoni and Fontana were striving more than Gherardo di Giovanni or Botticelli when he painted the “Birth of Venus”? And in any case what has Leonardo got to do with it, the multiform inventor of linear and pictorial nuances, with the monomaniac monochrome and cutting Fontana? This “striving line” of yours – one of the many curious theorems which fill up the lesser histories of art – reminds one of the little fable about recognition between fellows, on the basis of the principle by which a crow sits next to another crow: it is said that a dog always lay sleeping on the same tile and once Empedocles was asked why she did it, he answered: “the dog bears a certain resemblance to the tile ”. If on the other hand there is a different sense to your observation, I would like to assure you: I operate on all lines, on the tramline as much as the telephone line. I operate on 38, on 39, on 40 and I once even operated on 43: I remember that the painting varied between blue and red.

A.T.

I would like to be more precise. Your need to experiment with different techniques seems to me to be a constant factor, painting, cinema, sculpture, music, photography and theatre. What value to you ascribe to this trespassing? Is not the presence of the notion of “still life” in your x-rays a conceptual matter, even if stripped of any material veil? I ask myself if, in your omnivorous output, art is a form of defence from life or a confirmation of death. If, in other words, you lead man to immortality or from one death to another… I don not think indeed that your linguistic shiftiness is simply a matter of movement, or an attempt to deal with the art system.

R.M.

We often start out with great intentions of doing serious things, we sew two pieces of gaudy purple together, describing the sacred woods of Diana, an altar, a sinuous stream running through the beautiful countryside, the Rhine, the moist rainbow; yet there was no need. Did we decide to make an amphora so that the lathe could produce an Apothecary Jar?
Like everyone, I have read a little and above all seen a lot. I look up to many masters of the past - though in a way that they would like. I will give you a memorandum so that you can learn love for a high-class theft. Remember that locks are like women: sometimes they need violence, but sweetness is preferable. That is how it is done, without force: the false key enters the lock like a straw enters a lemon grenadine. You suck out everything, softly, sweetly, delicately - without ruining the furniture, because it is not ours. It has to be done so that the victim does not remember the theft unfavourably.
This is the spirit with which I approach my sources, though I do not worry too much about them; just as I do not worry about each distinct part of the painting but rather about the balance of the whole. Not the affection in art but how this prism reflects in the superior unity of painting. I worship Her.
Likewise when I played music I resolved matters in pure painting, constructing a notation system on the stave, played several times by an orchestra, and readable by computer too, based on form, spaciousness and tonality – variations between blue, red, yellow and black – and some blotches, assigned to certain instruments: what resulted - in terms of duration, pitch and harmonics of the sounds –was not therefore a way of rendering painting audible.
But it is a difficult cult. So, when I work too much with concepts I become obscure; when I seek smoothness I lose nerve and impetus; when I aspire to the sublime I get pomposity. And I lack a lot to be able to call myself an artist, an unworthy slave of an over demanding mistress.
Still I go on, absolutely sure, because if I crawl onto the deck of this boat of genius, afraid of the storm, I would lose sight of the lightening and the whirling movement of the waters: and all of this could finally bring me to create a painting like an immortal temple.
If fear of being hurt makes one fall, only a thoughtless wretch can seek a heroic mission, for me the mission is to restore Unity in painting and, among the arts, within the form of painting.
In fact, the modest craftsman who makes soft hair or fingernails in bronze has a hard task: not knowing he has to represent a whole. And it is no less for those who believe that hearing, touch and smell are not in principle useful, directed and submitted to sight, because he is used to calling them by other names: this is no stranger than the harmony of the senses we enjoy in Rimbaud (which they have saddled with the aseptic name of “synesthesia”) or else the description once given at Pisoni, of a painter who made a head to put on a horse’s neck together with members of every origin, in this beautiful woman enclosed into the tail of a fish. Is it no laughable matter: because the supreme privilege of painters and poets has always been not to try everything but to create.
And so, dear Alessia, if you insist on searching for a man behind the many masks each artist wears so as to reveal himself, you should simply know that there is nothing at all. Or better, on this stage, while I am representing a drama, showing my authentic face naked to the public, I deserve to be pelted with stones and kicked out of the Odeon like a madman: stripping the actor there was an old man in the place of a youth; a slave in the place of the king; a man of little worth in the place of God. And this is no senseless comedy. Do you remember how, when the wings of a theatre took fire, a buffoon came to announce the fact to the audience? They thought it was a joke and applauded, so he repeated the news, and they enjoyed it even more. That is it! I believe that the world will perish amidst universal enjoyment for these spirited people, these aesthetes: they think it is a joke.

A.T.

I understand, in this case, in your output, is art finite form or a confrontation with the infinite?

R.M.

Art is the visible infinite. The relationship between finite and infinite in the end is the problem of incarnation or, in general, the representation of the Sacred.
Man is, in fact, much more complex that observing his behaviour would lead us to believe and he cannot be summed up in ultimatums. Though the source is one the aspects of creation are three.
Everything comes from the Supreme Being - one and three, as we learn in Catechism: in ancient terms Amon-Râ-Ptah. Now if Phat is the motor of life, Khum is the carrier of forms; he is indeed the Power that unites human seed which Amon-Râ blessed with his breath (nef), so that the two compliments, male and female, can be perfectly united (menkh) through his action (khnem). Following this he modelled them ‘with his own two hands’ so as to reawaken swathed Ptah and make the gifts of the different Hathors effective. Indeed at the moment of each birth Khnum is assisted by a certain number of Powers – or functional Entities: the two principal ones are Meskhent and Renenutet. These powers confer the individual with the features that make up his inner nature, a nature which is his Ka: so on the wall – in the birth room of the temple of Luxor – we can see Khnum while, the same time, he models both a baby that is about to be born and its Ka.
The Ka therefore is the specific characteristic from which the incarnate bases its form; and it is the constant element that ensures the human being its identity, through its coming into being (its various kheprus).
But from the moment that Ka becomes a body, it develops a personal energy within the body itself, a will for existence, which will become the inek (the so-called ego in psychoanalytical terms). Now, being a primitive and blind force of the human soul, the inek is therefore devoid of any superior sentiment, it is the principle of selfishness; and the inek, growing in strength with the child, chrysalises the tendency of the Ka to affirm its own existence and ensure its continuity to its own advantage.
The inek – the ego – though a natural blind force, thus appears as the true personality, while instead it is only the reflection of the individual’s Ka; it is the ego that deceives man about the value of thought: but thought, for its part, is only a play of ephemeral forces and relative values; thought is something other (ki) when compared to the intelligence of the heart (sia), just as the inek is different when compared to the iu, the being.
Every real value belongs to the Ka: it is what holds the Spirit ‘together’; it is the only element thanks to which immortality can be achieved, it is the only guarantee of everlastingness of the human entity, because the Ka is the feature par excellence that has affinity with its constituting elements, and offers itself as the revelation of Amon-Râ-Ptah, which animate it.
The ego - inek – vessel of the inferior tendencies, which favour its selfishness, does not take the slightest heed of essential affinities and uses any heterogeneous impulse that exalts egocentricity without scurple. This is how impure and destructible elements are accumulated representing obstacles for the individual’s ‘possession’ of his Ka on this Earth and for his reunification with it in the Duat.
The Ka hosts and reveals the correspondence and the similarity between the parts of the body and the elements of the universe, between the digestive tract and the Nile estuary, between the bone structure of our legs and the sand dunes of the desert, between a dental arch and cliffs or a sea storm, between a spinal column and the Rocky mountains, between a skull and the Sahara desert, between our membranes and soft organs and the clouds; so too between wood, fabric, liquid and the heavenly vault. This has been the subject of my paintings for over twenty years.
I arrived at this after the first preliminary phases of knowledge, which lead us to Ka. Because it is precisely conscience, in the sense of confusion between various elements of the individual with those of the universe, that engenders the altruistic urge that distances selfishness for the Inek. All the hoarding instincts of your Inek will no longer have a reason to be if you become universal, conscious of the cosmic harmony and conscious of the fact that both your qualities and your science are in no way personal, they are only the imperfect reflections of the attributes of your Creator.
This is what I also tried to explain earlier, speaking of Schopenauer and the inconsistent relationship between the subjective and objective in the artwork.

A.T.

Though you look towards ancient wisdom, you work reveals an attitude that is intensely geared towards communication. What is the influence of communication technology on your present output?

R.M.

I generally believe that instruments are simply instruments: their influence goes only as far as their usage. Information technology in fact is an instrument I do not use. The idea that the widespread diffusion of this instrument must have effects on every form of creation and that it is so exceptional that it can leave no field of knowledge unchanged is similar to the conviction that certain preachers had that they could use comets as a convincing argument for conversion.
But if the Christians learnt nothing new about the nature of God thanks to comets, how could it be expected that pagans would learn? How could we think that God would expect the pagans to have acquired a better knowledge of him after having seen a comet?
Even without seeing a comet an astronomer knows that the movements of the heavens are marvellous. Just as an artist needs to examine the smallest twig or a fly to realise that there are more mysteries in these little bodies that all our technology will ever offer.
For this reason it is absurd to think that computer technology will lead to a better capacity of understanding art, or that art must necessarily invest in this subject.
This is also a scheme, derived from that ridiculously construed principle of the Spirit of the Time, imposing the use of certain means and the employment of certain ideas: on pain of not being modern.
I have an instinctive aversion to every form of collective isms, be it racism, nationalism, communism or, in art, periodism.
The understanding of an artist’s work (and I do not expect to be considered as such) starts at the end of those systems (schemes) to which, in prejudice, we feel he must adhere. Indeed, nobody has a subtler grasp on the weaknesses of each system; frightening when he demonstrates, more frightening still when he objects, endowed with a fruitful imagination, when he paints he contemporaneously demonstrates, seduces and dominates.

A.T.

I understand that you are against historicism, but of art is the standing of an idea in space, what is the concept of time that you apply to your creative processes?

R.M.

The standing of an idea in space? A book of mathematic formulae is perhaps so. It is because an artwork is not an idea but an emotion, that it vibrates rather than stands still, it is not solved within itself it is reflected in the Eternal, it attracts our eye.
I know I am stretching towards the origins, but I am certain that, before our fall, we observed splendid Beauty among the supreme realities as a Being. And having come down here we grasped it as the clearest sensation, because its destiny is to be that which is most manifest and amiable and shines most luminously. It is the reason why we make such a huge effort to see the Glade of Truth, where the soul finds its best nourishment. Beauty was given to us as a stimulus for the redemption of the spirit, and indeed Christ was said to be the most perfect Beauty.
This is the principle from which the artist sets out, his beliefs and the order to which he aspires. He knows, indeed, that those who have plans for a year will plant wheat while those who have plans for ten years will plant a tree. But if one has plans for a hundred years, or more, he must plant beauty. In fact when you plant wheat you reap once, when you plant a tree you harvest ten times. Spreading beauty one hundred times and more.
As for me, I have spent such a long part of my life, on the ground, planting wheat. Then, like one who has been recently initiated to the Mysteries and has contemplated reality deeply, I saw a spectral and divine form. At first I began to shudder, fear overcame me, like a strange warm perspiration. Through my eyes the flow of beauty pervaded me and I still venerate and adore it: because it gave back life to my wings, which had shrivelled up so long ago. They have begun to grow from the roots, right through the entire form of the soul; because the soul was once winged in every part.
Poetic sentiment is so much like falling in love...

A.T.

It is clear to me that the evolution of your work rests on the philosophical axis of neo-platonic doctrine, which, on the other hand has supported the evolution of European art from mannerism to today. To what extent do you feel a participant of this?

R.M.

I do not understand from where you draw such vague and unstable convictions. First of all the masterpieces inspired by neo-Platonist doctrine promulgated by some critical circles (including the most famous of them animated and encouraged by Lorenzo il Magnifico in Florence) came to an end by the end of the fifteenth century. That is before mannerism came into being. Secondly, the concept of evolution in art is opposed to everything that neo-platonic doctrine declares – from Plotinus to Porphyry to Gnosticism. In synthesis, they consider the progress of reality as an unstoppable distancing from the One – the Beautiful, the True, the Good – that is to say an unstoppable decadence.
There are moreover a variety of beliefs, some of which have been borrowed and mutated from neo-Platonism and not originating in it. For example the relationship between the human body and the universe – between the Ka and Amon-Râ-Ptah, between the soul and the Trinity – it appears therefore similar to a universal harmony: it was so also for the neo-Platonists, each part of the universe was in sympathy with the other, like a tightened cord where the vibration struck at the bottom conveys to the top. And this harmony is born out of similar and contrary at the same time.

A.T.

I will stick to more tangible things. I wonder whether your ability to anticipate certain aspects of today’s communication is a question of pure observation or a result which is implicit in your artistic language.

R.M.

My x-rays have nothing to do with advertising, even though some precise formal modules I had investigated for first, have appeared in the last years, since 1978, with considerable emphasis in great variety of advertising campaigns. The x-ray itself has now become a dominant theme. Indeed I am working on a cycle on this subject: ‘re-appropriations due’.
However, advertising and Art, within their own attributes, differ as writing and literature do: while the first is made of grammar, the second is poetry. Of course some advertisements are extremely well made, but the interest lies ion their non-advertising, intimately alien aspects, the aura of persuasion enveloping the promoted object, through theatrical and latently artistic tricks. Even from this point of view advertising is always surrogate, spurious suggestion: the whole does not appear, only a part, deception is sought rather than the truth.
I would like to finish this conversation, I have spoken too much. To say what, in the end? Nothing will be found among my papers (and this is my consolation), not one single explanation of what really filled my life. In the recesses of my soul no text will be found to explains everything, to change that which the world sees as nonsense in what I consider extremely important events, events that I too consider futile once I remove that single secret note which is the key.

A.T

I am surprised to note that even historians of ancient art have approached your work; Sir Denis Mahon no less has defined it as a second Caravaggio, the same frown, the same and bad temper.

R.M.

Yes, yes... the same frown and same bad temper... I am good, honest, with just one little defect that Merisi also had: shall we have dinner? However before Mahon Federico Zeri and Andrea Emiliani also praised my defects.

A.T.

Emiliani should have really been thankful: I heard tell of a donation, thanks to which the picture gallery in Bologna was able to acquire an important painting, I think it was a precious landscape by Annibale Carracci.

R.M.

Truly it was a small gesture.

A.T.

A small gesture that has been a habit of yours. I also heard about Izmit, cancer research in Genoa and the Red Cross in Sarajevo...

R.M.

I do what I can..