MINIMUM THOUGHTS
LA FUGA DI UN ARTISTA DENTRO IL SISTEMA 
Un artista pieno di creatività è scomparso.
Ma il sistema è chiuso, gli artisti non possono uscire, l'artista si trova nel sistema.
Il sistema è stato controllato e l’artista non c’è, l’artista era diretto verso la verità, ma l’artista non è mai arrivato.
Come si spiega che un artista possa circolare nel sistema da 50 anni senza essere mai visto?
Proprio così.
Di fatto l'arte non può essere vista.
Questo artista, MR, senza presentare nessun limite, con tutto il sistema funzionante appieno, con altri 3.000 artisti in circolazione?
In qualche punto della sua carriera è svanito, si è imbattuto in un nodo.
Con il sistema che funziona appieno, si è imbattuto in un nodo, un nodo non è una ostruzione. Un nodo è una peculiarità, un polo di un ordine superiore, credo che ciò sia causato dai critici, dal mercato. Il sistema è di una spaventosa complessità e i critici, il mercato ne hanno fatto una cosa assolutamente singolare.
Non ho ancora capito del tutto, ma posso dedurre che il sistema si comporta come il nodo di Moebius. Una superficie con una sola faccia lungo la quale posso creare all’infinito senza poter essere notato, riconosciuto. A dire il vero il sistema è al di là della mia portata, non posso fare altro che continuare a creare.
Se eliminassimo il sistema, i critici e il mercato?
L'artista non apparirà mai, ma se riapparisse non è detto che appaia nella giusta ispirazione. In questo caso è probabile il suicidio dell'artista.
E’ come dire che l’artista è entrato in una dimensione altra, chè è andato, che è sparito, che non si trova nel sistema.
Cosa potete fare per riportare l’artista nel sistema, in questo sistema?
Per me la pittura è bella ... è finito. Si presume che io dia una spiegazione di quello che voglio dire, la cosa assurda è che non ho nessuna spiegazione, perchè non ne ho nessuna e ne sono l’autore, come posso spiegare quello che trasmettono le mie opere, ciò lo sento per me, non per loro. Siamo diversi
In certi quadri e spazi, il tempo resta immobile.
Scienza e Filosofia e Arte sono molto vicine.
Tutto ciò è semplicemente ridicolo.
L'artista incrocia un nodo dopo le Biennali Musica e Cinema 1981 - 1983 e per combinazione giusta al momento giusto scattano le proprietà per applicare il nodo di Moebius.
L’uomo ha inventato una infinità di macchine ma ha dimenticato che egli stesso è una macchina più complicata di quelle che ha inventato. Non ci sono mai stati limiti, l’uomo non conosce i suoi limiti nè le sue possibilità, non sa fino a che punto non riconosce. Siamo talmente occupati a cercare valori esteriori che non ci rendiamo conto di ciò che realmente ha valore.
Basterebbe dirlo per cambiare, ma io l’ho detto.
Forse qualcuno ti ha creduto?
Viviamo in un mondo dove nessuno più ascolta.
Cosa penso di fare? Niente, arriverà il momento.
L'arte dei nostri tempi è senza dubbio un simbolo dei nostri tempi, un labirinto dove possiamo leggere un bilancio, rivedere una situazione e cercare di raggiungere lo spirito, un cambiamento di vita. E' uno strano gioco, ci caliamo in centinaia di quadri senza renderci conto che ad ogni cambio di quadro stiamo cambiando definitivamente il nostro sentire, il nostro essere. Nelle mostre. Ho scoperto il più potente osservatorio, ma non avrei mai pensato che fosse così difficile usare questo osservatorio, ottenere spazi dove poter osservare.
Non potranno mai svegliarsi prima di rendersi conto di essersi addormentati.
Ho paura delle vertigini.
E’ normale nessuno può trovarsi di fronte all’infinito senza provare le vertigini, nessuno può vedere la mia opera senza sentirsi profondamente disorientato. Mi sto muovendo nella velocità del pensiero, come posso essere affascinato da questa vita privata di attrattive di ingenuità, di spontaneità. Come non preferire di restare qui, nell’anonimato se là fuori un mare di sordità, di cecità, ci sta trascinando irrimediabilmente disgraziati, ignorati. Ma la mia opera non può andare perduta. Nè gli uomini nè il tempo spariscono senza lasciare traccia. Restano impressi nelle nostre anime.
E’ TORNATO L'ARTISTA. PORTATELO IN MOSTRA.
of Renato Meneghetti:
MINIMUM THOUGHTS 
1968
Money is the motor of revolution.
Creating a consumer paradise where there are no traces of blood.
1970
My strange repugnant phagocytes are the voice, the conscience of the people, or of my internal problems.
1977
My phagocyting elements open the eyes of the world.
1979
My anarchic and blasphemous doodles.
1980
... It has to be made clear: if those who appear to be the “doctrinarians of anti-doctrine”, the “new philosophers of image”, the “experimenters par excellence”, sustain that only what photography photographs can be held as being noteworthy because in that way “anything becomes the sophisticated maxim of value, because substantially the photo is surprised by the moment as one does not know why it was taken” (Roland Barthes), for my part things are different precisely on the level of programmatic choice.
In this case there is the reasonable and concrete risk of falling into the fetters of ideology, of theorising rather than acting, of being phagocytised by the means rather than the end: of an art programme, which leads to an iconographic programme without a precise aim, which leaves everything to pure chance and the real terms of totally unanswered discourse.
Here, instead, despite chance, iconography and means are aspects of considerable significance, we stand before a precise proposition: everyday things are revalued, reprogrammed and exalted not as an exterior mode of image, rather as temporal significance...
... the photographic means, first, provides the technical support and the culminating technological moment: the satanic method of “stop, you’re beautiful!”, which then evolves during development, in the act of running off again, escaping the ever-present temptation to stop, giving in to corruption in a final solution and a “substantial” objective reached...
When you offer me your hands I will turn my eyes away because your hands are covered in blood.
Celebrated and penniless artist, it would suit one of my halves.
Surely my relatives will want to spit at me and the world will want to destroy my canvasses. They will not be able because they will understand that it is a portrait of themselves.
Alcohol anaesthetic of the world.
They are both dead.
Who was the first to die?
That one. This one is the champion.
You, bourgeois person, full of complexes, do not try to get around me, do not try to gain my trust.
1981
... at the same time I let a further evolution develop towards more complex aesthetic forms in reality more generically transferable, because my problem is to present myself through forms of language which are more simple the more complex the material at hand becomes.
Thus, after the experience of the transformations and transfers undertaken with Insania, where the dialectics are in full expressible assonance with the nature of the image, where we still play on representation that is charged with meaning into which the observer is automatically induced to take his place, and where the proposition is “crystallised” in a frame that follows composite aesthetic canons, I now try to quickly free myself from the omnipresent risk of exhausting a phase in my concept which, from certain points of view, is still affected...
... the justification for all historical figures to perceive their own limit, their own anxiety, their own wretched thirst for eternity in the imminent mortality of their state...
... the sequences of the journey through the places of the x-rays, the regions of the body, where transgression expires among the simulacra of appearance, and the voice, the last expression of being, is extinguished on the horizon of silence.
But, at this point, the image delivers up the vibrations of shadows, of residues. And fear, despair, anger and desire are composed again in a symphony...
I am convinced that the exhibition will show up, that is it will denounce, the evils of the world. People will understand and try to be better.
“You are mad. Your works are the people. So he who has a vice will recognise it and take pleasure in it because it is “his”, he has chosen it. And the painting, at the very most, will awaken the instinct in him, which will bring out desire.
Monologue
I created these symbols to show how man is phagocytised, absorbed by society, which takes away any personality, any positive, moral value, and leaves him naked, grounded, corrupt.
Actually I sought within myself, I tried to see, and was often blocked by fear.
You know, when you take something slimy in your hands, a snake looks you in the eye and says “don’t you recognise me? I am you yourself”, what you have found is a small death. Instinctively you refuse it.
Suddenly, impulsively you try to throw it away, to get away from it. But it is a part of you, there is nothing you can do. It is there. If you have enough strength you can look up again; and if you can hear clear and decisive reasons, you can find the energy to gauge that violence, record it and expose it. You can have it in your power, overcome the nausea of looking at it, and force it to reveal itself, break it open, violate it and dissect it.You are left with understanding, the consciousness of no longer being subjected to its subtle constrictions, the disorders, the subjugation of evil.
The procedure has been completed. The phrase, the prescription, the formula has exorcised that particular minor death, the putrid serpent that you first looked upon with so much terror, the horror of recognising it in yourself, and this is awful, frightening.
But when you are reborn, master of yourself, you identify, distinguish, admit, confess, accept.
And you recognise that horrible little serpent as being common to all those you have known, and you extend this, you understand that it belongs to every man.
It is the sense behind this concept. In the art work all of this is denounced: as an artist I have had the strength to experience this small death.
“I believe that you deceive yourself thinking that people will try to be better after having seen, and understood these things.A pious illusion, coming to awareness. If your paintings “are” the people, I think that those who are with sin, or guilt, dishonesty or perversion will certainly recognise it. But not so as to deny it. Instead they will enjoy it. They will be amused to find it, the will be comforted to know they share “their own preferences” with another person, in short: not to be alone. And they will enjoy it. Certainly. In that painting they will savour the essence of their vice; they will be pleased by your choice.
Each vice is carefully chosen, didn’t you know? It becomes intimately yours, it conditions your reactions, your decisions, your preferences; it guides you when you have alternatives. Virtue too does this. But bad habits, defects, blemishes, weaknesses have so much more strength, It is, after all, the violence that evil exercises on good.
It is the convenience of evil too. It is its utility. When personal selfishness stops you from worrying about the means you use and whatever system you use is fine for reaching your objective, then vice is also convenient for you, then any injustice is opportune and any evil advantageous.
What did he want from me! My body or my genius.
Both are for sale.
Money I want you and would deny you — I violate you or better I completely forget you.
I will hit the world like a hurricane covering it with phagocyting shit.
Corruption and money dominate the world — but not my genius.
And I continue to run, run, run, and my soul is taken with money.
I exempt you from believing in me.The tree: roots – leaves – earth – sun
The need of both
Two equals: to have and to be.
The heart — the head, exchangeable bills.
Blessed is he who walks not under the sign of money.
I am not a God — I am a man — how long have I been here.They say I will bring freedom
Pay me before I begin — I am a guaranteed product.
They are destroying our brains reducing them to neon dust. Here is our instrument of death: television. SAVE the children!!!...there are those who say: a painting that reveals vice will make vice loathsome.
there are those who say: a painting the reveals vice will legitimise vice in the eyes of the chaste, enliven it for the perverse...
1982
... thus the evolution of distilled needs through new terminology leads me to reconsider myself and my activity, I bring it forth in a new work, where it is possible to manifest and synthesise the multiple and unstable necessities...
Mine are the pretentious ramblings of a genius.
I refuse any association with any commonly accepted or recognised canon.
Art be my shepherd, my saviour teach me the way, save me.
The reason for all of this: I believe that I am immortal!
I am as if dead, worse than dead if my genius does not come to the world.
When society ends you will finally be free. And so freedom is this.
Our only thought is to make money.
A new vibration you will see me from afar I am sensational.
And He said: let us make man in our image and likeness: and he will govern over the fish in the sea, and the birds in the air, and the beasts, and all the earth, and all the reptiles that move on the face of the earth...
And God blessed them and said: grow and multiply and fill the earth and dominate it; and you will be lords over the fish in the sea, and the birds in the air, and the beasts that move on the face of the earth.
“New philosophers of the image”, the “experimenters” par excellence sustain that what is considered noteworthy is only that which photography can encapsulate, because in that way “anything can rise to the maximum sophistication of expressive value, because in substance the photograph becomes the reality of the moment” (Roland Barthes). For me things are different precisely on the level of programmatic choice.
If Barthes were right, we would run the reasonable and concrete risk of falling into the fetters of ideology, of theorising rather than acting, of being phagocytised by the means rather than the end: setting out from of an art programme, we reach an iconographic programme without a precise aim, which leaves everything to pure chance and abandons the real terms of discourse (one of these is when and how much an image is art and how much and when it is not) completely unanswered..
…This means that the artist who is far from the world of the system, must have his own means, or he must rely on the alms that are offered to him; the rain that falls from the sky does not give the pleasure of observing the Stars within their divine scope…
1983
... the awareness of the need to transfer my image from the particular to the universal, from the sensual concupiscence of the object to the charismatic exaltation of the subject: the burden of facing the concrete problem of becoming the archetype of all manifestations of human reality in the essential elements of its principal delineations, is an exaltation of considerable importance for me, under the aesthetic aspects of its material and concrete representation, a challenge perfectly suited to my characteristics….
... But it is important that I have attained awareness of such a reality, because this has allowed me to define myself and keep myself within my own highly personal aesthetic credo, which, while it is certainly open to criticism and opinion, also enjoys unquestionable composite originality and highly interesting opportunities for future investigation…
... My everlasting dilemma, the struggle between my exalted activism and the operative result that is always fixed to the present, worn out by its bonds with the static nature of image — and therefore of the tendency for meaning to be crystallised which I feel becomes ever more too much for its own sake — spurs me on to activate this acquired awareness of human reality, towards an evolutionary aesthetic offering in a dynamic sense... When I made it I thought it was of no use to anyone but I made it the best I could. The line between genius and madness in me is very fine. You have made it, now you are the best. The astonished eyes of the people look towards the heavens, they ask: who will free us from the tyrant?
How can I do it!
It is nice to pretend, is it not?
No!
But at least we thought so.
My body feels pain, not I.
I am desperate!
I beg you, look at me!
I play the part well, do I not?
It is not I who disagree with the world it is the world that does not agree with me.
I cannot kill myself.
I cannot kill my master
I cannot kill my genius.
Your wings are broken start learning to fly.Those who want me will not have me cheaply, however I do not want to disturb their dreams.
And he commanded them saying eat of all the plants of paradise. But of the fruit of the tree of science, of good and evil, do not eat, insomuch as on the day you eat of it you will surely die. Forbidden of this fruit the man began to pine...
But the serpent said to the woman: you will certainly not die.
Insomuch as God knows, at whatever time you eat of it … you will be as God, you will know good from evil.
Wherefore the woman saw the fruit of the tree was good to eat ….and she picked it and ate of it; and she gave it onto her husband and he too ate of it.
...Only with broken wings did I develop a passion for flying...
1984
Too much perfection is a mistake.
There is no longer an audience for me.
Hey! Monster come her, I will pay you very well.
1985
... The reason behind my work lies in the representation of the idea, the concept in the immanence of experiencing it.
... I have to fix the idea in the image and convey the image conveying the idea at the same time, so it will relive in every nerve of the spectator...
... The universal cannot become extinct because it is condemned to evolve. Life — an activity that is not determined restrictively — being a metahistorical entity, is an unavoidable evolutional continuum. The central question is the intimate absence of the philosophy of the issue represented; it is nothing other than pitting the particular against the universal, the finite against the infinite, and the curse of movement for its own sake against the immobility of an attained objective. If in an extremely personalised struggle man and the divinity were always set in a position of reciprocal and opposed compensation, here we have an attempt to adapt by, on the one hand, the depersonalisation of the opposition and on the other the attempt of the conscious “finite” to reach the infinite...
I am always deeply dissatisfied with all my things...
The x-rays bear witness to a turning point that is not social, it is rather anthropological.
I’m am not overcome by fear of death — I am immortal and therefore I portray it in its phagocyting manifestations.
I despise myself but this will not manage to save me.
I have painted a lot or a little, however I am a failure or perhaps not!
1986
... Metaphorically speaking I have discovered myself no longer to be the hand of the painter, but his active brush through my own physical aesthetic proposition, manipulated with all the conceptual and cathartic elements I have discovered along my personal quest for clarity...
I cry at night and have no solace
I cry during the day and have no solace
My Art – My Art why have you abandoned me.
1987
... But it is the means of language that I have taken on that I develop that qualifies me and is important to me.
I have also overcome the single mystification of the photogram; I have left technical interventions on the plate, or directly related to it, behind me, to achieve a conceived and wilful aesthetic result, to create totally different mystifications..
1988
The work is reflected in the mirror that refers it to another in an endless theory, this is my immortal life because it starts from theory.
1990
Nobody loves you because you love nobody...
Because when you believe you are giving even then you are really taking.
1992
My work began from you.
My mind has begun to wander....A successful painting, a painting is never a painting it will be an archetype of all human reality in the essential elements of its principal delineations...
1995
... I had wanted to go over the course of my career again concentrating in particular on those images, recalled and suggested, on the concepts expressed that struck me particularly, which perhaps I had specifically intended according to a primitive intention but through a mysterious process that oversees the intimate relationship between author and reader...
... Thus the constructed present, at times in full light and at times in the shade, at times comprehensible on a first reading at others difficult and impenetrable, is nothing other that the tiring journey through renewed roads in my artist’s soul, it represents nothing other than that philosophical document that I myself have drawn up in reality about myself..
Behind You I see millions of people.
From You millions of geniuses.
My world shall be that which I will be.
The darkness of my existence has passed.
1996
... Sublimation of the interpolation of images, of the discovery of new worlds and new horizons that can be obtained by successive overlapping and targeted mystifications ...
I will be the master of my own soul.
1997
... As I go along the through the procession of works I interpret these continuous deaths and rebirths, oppressed on the one hand by the consciousness of the limits of time, subject to the overbearing inevitability of a “destiny” which always intrudes interrupting the scope of human endeavour at the culminating moment, and on the other the unconscious conviction of the vital necessity of continuous advancement, on pain of complete extinction not so much of the species — what is it if not historical determinism — but of life itself as essence and absolute concept...
... In this work which is born, as my works are always born, from a sudden intuition and its rapid creation through frenetic labour, with manifest joy I discover my perfect adaptability to the radiographic means... The x-ray provides me with the possibility, thanks to its inexhaustible and continuous technical development, to continuously change my aesthetic programme and consequent representation. It is subject to no other dogma except that of beign at the anthetisis, there is no better dogma than not having one!
Death perhaps is a marvellous thing perhaps... for others. My works have always been born from sudden intuition and rapid frenzy…
1998
I am objective in an intransigent manner. I see Intransigent objectiveness in my x-rays.
... Always been my dilemma: it is the struggle between the overexcited energy that overcomes me and the lasting result of my work as it stands on the present, exhausted by the constraints of staticness (the objects that surround us are “still” or their life pulses in ours) and therefore the tendential crystallisation of the meaning of objects, of the message that they convey which I feel becomes each time too much for its own sake. It is a message that stimulates, that invites me _ like an inclined plain – towards the accomplishment of a newfound consciousness of human reality, towards a form of evolutionary aesthetic offering, in a dynamic sense.
I wrote this in 1983. After fifteen years, it seems that humankind has landed in the New World. Think how much has changed in these last fifteen years. Indeed, rereading myself as if at a century’s distance, I compliment myself. Or I feel myself to be intimately ridiculous.
1999
Choosing to take the way of the stars a man must travel alone, perhaps for this reason I do not know how to love and am little loved.
In my x-ray works the form is void and the void is the form.
I want to go beyond every illusion: no longer death nor until death.My works touch the fears of our psyche because they represent something we cannot understand.
They are in direct visual connection with the phenaim eisenst in the DNA.
I am undertaking a journey through life depicting death.“Our field is not so much national or regional it is the complete consciousness of the whole earth. The spirit of our times is universalistic and all the significant elements of this time adapt to the necessity to universalise the awareness and consciousness of man. Our future depends on this consciousness, our only chance of saving ourselves from an age of universal obscurantism”.
Only a means of expression for an essentially reflective work can become aware of the void to achieve perfect communion with the universe.
To aim directly at the spirit of mankind, achieve awareness of one’s own imagination, of one’s own evocative aptitude, of personal observational capacity. Simplicity, immediacy and depth, the fundamental concepts are reached after the sign, probing hidden forces, acquires a rhythmic intensity equal to the immediacy of the spirit.
Continuous experimentation, the calligraphic impulse, then, leads works to new dimensions with which “to create impetus and confusion, the frenetic rhythm, the incessant pulsation of large cities, the intermingling of light and the floods of people locked in the grids of their networks”, with constant thought towards the principle of evolution, always oscillating between exterior and interior life, between old and new, in the infinitely grand and the infinitely small. Searching for the essence of life between the rational and the superrational, poised between lofty thought and elementary truth.An acquired strength escaping from the issue of being figurative or non-figurative. Visual testimonies are indeed one and the other according to the moment and, especially, to human experience up until that time. Everything has been natural and therefore nothing is contradictory. It is, in substance, Kandinsky’s law of interior necessity, but not in the sense of spontaneous issue because it starts each time from “an exterior motive”, which has attempted to investigate like the interior space of the world of which Rilke spoke.
I have drawn breath through the sign (the urgent aspiration of a universal interpretation of the interior world in which the secret of the unity of the Whole is enclosed) and therefore every sign is essential because it is regulated on the heartbeat perpetual motion-essence of the soul.
Through the sign I have overcome the effort to penetrate beyond the mirror on a daily basis, to grasp the light that lies in the intimate depths of form, to define this undefined reality which is the active ingredient of life. The sign as immediate expression of spiritual experience, deep introspection into the abyss of the unconscious, mysterious traces of timeless writing, imaginative fertility. I have meticulously recorded the details of my emotions and meditations drawing the trajectories of my investigations beyond the confines of any other decent into the depths of the spirit and the psyche.
Unpredictable when loading the mind of one’s own computer, I have decomposed, shattered and x-rayed thought and existence so as to recompose the whole, making use of the generative properties pf material and light, in a infinitely variable series of combinations that becomes richer each time.
Hermetic cryptography within a cybernetic framework, but rich in contrasts, of a slow escape of memories, of a rapid placing of the self beyond the wall of one’s own destiny, a leap into the unknown of research and truth. I changed name (MR the phagocytised) half way through my career so as to begin from scratch. I took back my name (Meneghetti) to be able to start afresh again.
For me it is essential to know why life can interest me so deeply, and this comes about thanks to its mystery: that which is unknowable, that which science cannot reduce to expressible knowledge. Just so much as I do not know the reasons why I live and die. I am an incurable and attentive investigator into the eternal struggle between the hidden visible and the apparent visible.I am a little like Magritte. My brush stroke is banal, in fact it does not exist and what counts is what it shows.
The work is reflected in the mirror that refers it to another in an endless theory, this is my immortal life because it starts from theory. Is certain that I have respect for the past, of art and not only. but it is also certain that I have the right to experience the present in my way and I have the duty to contribute to creating my future and that of others with intuitions, projects and works. What distinguishes an artist from a banker, a painter from a night watchman, a creative individual from a replicant (let it be taken without offence, for many years I myself was phagocytised), if not the intuition that society evolves over time and that we evolve with itExist a dichotomy between the language of the artist and the language of the observer.
One has to make oneself understood. I feel this problem, also because of the complexity of work. I set out on a continuous evolution of complex and extreme aesthetic forms and therefore I transform the most generically untransferable reality into secular, civil, highly comprehensible icons. My problem is to put myself forward through forms of language which become more simple according to the increasing complexity of the material they treat. Who has the courage to put a skull on the canvass and entitle it “Portrait of x y, while thinking”? In the image you find all my way of making art. The reason for my work lies in representing the idea, in the concept of the immanence and future of experience.
My conscience is clear. I have transferred my image from the particular to the universal: an operation that is fundamental for an artist’s Ex (express, externalise, execute). But, well, yes, I have sinned: in the anthology of my works I have sensually desired the object to the point of its charismatic exaltation.
Something other than hyperrealism alla John De Andrea. If you love art you have to go for the heart of the object and make it leap.
You have to make it become your object archetype, which has to beat in unison with your heart. My skeletons and x-ray plates are nothing else than a clamorous, total “parallel divergence” from the hyperrealists and their surfaces. Reality has never been epidermic. The aesthetic and essential truth, like rheumatism, is in our bones.
There is one thing about my work that still manages to amaze me: it often happened to me in my youth and it has happened again in my later years that I manage to foretell trends, anticipate fashions, currents of thought and themes of communication.
Leafing through magazines, turning on the television or going to the cinema I am amazed how my ideas are used (later) by others. Now, there could be two explanations: either “x-rays” have exercised such a strong attraction and I noticed that in 1978, or my mind has a faculty of irradiation such as can condition art directors and make them work with skeletons. Ideas become postal material. I am a wanderer: a sort of aura that travels in space and reaches somewhere. It is a pity there is no copyright on bones.
The Brahman says: “Look around you, everything you see is you”.
I say: “We will be petrified by the horror we experience”.
Who is right? The Brahman and his millenniums of wisdom or the researcher who sees a dark future? I look around me. But I do not feel guilty or any responsibility for what is happening. I have done my share of exposure, my dear Brahman. While you were sitting in contemplation in some monastery in Nepal in 1968 I was having my ass kicked by the police in Padua. While you practiced yoga I was painting against the phagocytising society (I myself was phagocytised) in the same years that Pasolini was railing against a homologating and homologated society.
But neither you with your ascetism nor I with my craziness have done any good. Society still produces replicants. Already the first cloned individual (I know about skeletons) is there, knocking at the door.
It is important not to intensify the disputes about figurative and non-figurative art. My “x-rays” are one and the other depending on the point of view and the state of mind (and culture) of the observer who stands before the work of art.
Whatever form, image, landscape or cloud is outside but it is inside us. The human body contains everything that is observable in nature. A muscle, a stomach or a brain are “landscapes”.
For the doctor they are the landscapes of illness or health. For the artist they are only forms, with or without an aesthetic sense.
Continued experimentation, the creative impulse, the necessity to communicate: they are the “three” operative phases that allow me to continue climbing the hairpin bends of art, among the lights and shadows of life, among ancient and new languages while the landscape, like in the mountains, is infinitely large and infinitely small.
I confess at times I continue to climb and to stay at the same point. Like on an escalator.
The flight of an artist inside the art system
An artist of great creativity has disappeared.
But the system is closed, the artists cannot go out, the artist finds himself inside the system.
The system has been controlled and the artist is not there, the artist was headed towards the truth, but the artist never arrived.
How can it be that an artist has been inside the system for fifty years without ever being seen?
Just like that.
In fact art cannot be seen.
The artist, without having any limit, with the entire system functioning fully, disappeared at a certain point of his career, he got stuck at a junction.
With the system that was functioning fully he got caught at a junction, a junction is not an obstruction. A junction is a peculiarity, the pole of a higher order; I believe it was caused by the critics, by the market. The system is of frightening complexity and the critics and the market have made something absolutely singular of it.
I have still not understood completely, but I can deduce that the system behaves like the Moebius strip. A surface with a single face along which one can create infinitely without ever being noticed or recognised. To tell the truth the system is quite beyond my comprehension, I can do nothing but continue to create.
If we eliminated the system, the critics and the market?
The artist will never appear, but if he reappeared it is not to be sure that he would appear in the right inspiration.
In this case the artist’s suicide is probable.
And how can we tell that the artist has entered another dimension, that he has gone, that he has disappeared, that he cannot be found in the system?.
What can be done to bring the artist back into the system, in this system?
For me painting is beautiful ... it is complete. It is presumed that I give an explanation of what it is supposed to say, the absurd thing is that I have no explanation, because I have none and I am the author, how can I explain what my works convey, I feel it for myself, not for them. We are different.
In certain paintings and spaces, time stands immobile.
Science and philosophy and art are very close.
All this is simply ridiculous.
The artist came to a junction at the Music and Cinema Biennales of 1981 - 1983 and by combination just at the moment when the right conditions were there to apply the Moebius strip. Man has invented an infinity of machines but he has forgotten that he is an infinitely more complicated machine than those he has invented. There have never been limits, man knows neither his limits or his possibilities, he does not no to which extent he does not know. We are so busy looking for exterior values that we do not realise what really has value.
It would be enough to say it in order to change, but I said it.
Did anyone believe me?
We live in a world where nobody listens anymore.
What do I think I can do? Nothing, the time will come.
The art of our times is, without doubt, a symbol of our times, a labyrinth where we can read a balance sheet, re-evaluate a situation and attempt to reach the spirit, a change of life. It is a strange game; we delve into hundreds of paintings without realizing that at each change of painting we are definitively changing our feeling, our being. At exhibitions. I have discovered the most potent observatory, but I would never have thought that it was so difficult to use this observatory, to obtain a space where one could observe.
They will never be able to wake without first realizing that they are a sleep. I am afraid of vertigo.
It is normal, nobody can stand before the infinite without feeling vertigo, nobody can see my works without feeling deeply disorientated. I move at the speed of thought, how can I be fascinated by this private life of attractions of ingenuity, of spontaneity? How not to prefer to stay here, in anonymity, if out there an ocean of deafness, of blindness is dragging us irreparably luckless and ignorant. But my work cannot be lost. Neither man nor time can disappear without a trace. The stay impressed on our souls.
The artist has returned. Bring him to the exhibition.
What has been is only illusion; yet not even the illusion remains…
2000
My work is not what I see; it is what I feel and what I am.
Exploring x-rays I see beyond, to something else, which unfailingly I find in everyday observation. Why is the contrary exercise not successful?
It happens all the time and
It is beautiful to anticipate things,
I begin from things,
The end of things,
The end of the millennium,
The beginning of the Third.
Yesterday an important art historian said to me, as if it were almost a criticism, perhaps considering it a limit: — “But do you always need a photograph as a base for painting?” — (forgetting that in a very recent interview he himself had stated: “The x-rays by Meneghetti are the only new event to have occurred on the Italian art scene in these last twenty years”).
I did not think it appropriate to point out that my background was in pure painting and that my artistic expression was a sort of curse whereby I saw that which others did not see also within a photograph, within an x-ray plate (even more “beyond the eye” – bravo Vittorio).
For this reason I always get there twenty years early. Seeing a piece of marble, or wood, or a photograph, or an x-ray plate, I see beyond, I see somewhat else grasping the micro in the micro and vice versa, seeing that which ordinary people do not see.
This is how the interior landscapes are born which reach me through the interior and which I put towards the exterior on a canvass that I paint and nothing remains of the pretext, the point of departure. Already during the eighties I had expressed my thoughts on photography as a form of art: “I claim that photography and cinema have the same rights and cultural fertility as painting.
I have discovered that this means has the capacity for daily commentary, the rapid ability to fix an event without layers of cultural imposture. I always find the images and the images behind the images, after which there is the artwork. Today, 16 July 2000 I discovered that I am the last futurist and I undersign the manifestos of 1909 and 1910: “...Who can still believe in the opaqueness of bodies, while our acuity and multiplied sensitivity leads us to sense the obscure manifestations of mediumistic phenomena? Why do we still have to continue believing without taking our visual power into account when it can give us results analogous to those of the x-ray?How can we still see human faces as rosy, while our lives are unquestionably doubled in night-walking? the human face is yellow, red, green, blue and violet. The pallor of a woman looking in the window of a jeweller’s is more iridescent that all the prisms of the jewels that enchant her. Our sensations cannot be whispered. We have them sung and screamed on our television sets blowing deafening, triumphant fanfares. Your eyes, used to the shadows open up to the vision of the light. The shadows we paint will be more luminous than the lights of our predecessors...”
I investigated beyond the subject, that serene light that I aspire to reveal, which my eye follows in the black night as the moth follows the flame that is its death
Art, the mirage that sight does not discern from more solid structures.... This causes me great pain, has always caused me the greatest pain: the fear that the name of things is always more important than the things themselves. And that it is sufficient to create new names and evaluations and likenesses to create new things on the long run. Here is the deceit. We know the glades of Being and we can even reach out and touch them, but at the same time it is the farthest thing from us. We are the poets of a tragedy, sitting on the throne of these Muses that have demon eyes: always remember that oblivion of the truth of Being in favour of the imposition of an entity is decadence. This is a mystical ascesis and liberation for all. Simply left to its own devices society would return to its primitive form, as a solution of salt left on its own would turn to cubic crystals?
At this point like a cloud I return to my place, I bring a breath of silver.
...Simplicity, immediacy and depth are one single thing. I try to reach these things experimenting with forms and emotions, like the calligrapher who seeks a good rhythm for his hand, a rhythm that is consonant with the rhythm of things in general...
...Art is distinction, identification, admission, confession, submission...
...The radiologist, who must base his diagnosis on the most ephemeral shadows that appear in a tissue, learns paying the price of a difficult apprenticeship, how “seeing is” often “believing”...
Shadow is light, light is shadow.
I take joy from your words, in this great comedy of degradation that I have played for you …
…What better “Room of the soul” than this we have under the epithelium, under nerves, arteries and bones? It is truly the “Room of the soul” that I seek with my x-rays.
“Beyond the eye” the “Secret structure” that governs things. The soul
The x-rays are a portrait, where however, we are not beautiful and elegant. We appear naked. We literally look like an ape, an octopus, a primitive figure in the mist… from the front we can see ourselves like a beautiful moon, full and luminous.
2001
“Dust you were and to dust thou shall return”.
Everything returns to its first condition.
As long as it is visible enjoy the colourful breath of life. Everything will return to its first condition. The x-rays: grey grey grey, a touch of depth a flash of white light. Everything will return to its first condition: enjoy it while you can.
“X-rays”: Roentgen, accursed Roentgen. Precisely because they are luminescent they fear the light of the sun. Nocturnal creatures that are hidden from the light of the day. “Hunting for shadows” and for shade I must add.
The conservation of my works: my recurring nightmare. Well motivated on the other hand, because the problem persecutes me for over half a century in which I have painted on average twenty works per year and today there are really so many that need to be preserved.
As if it was not enough, for my own internal needs I have bought back almost everything I have sold and now there are hundreds of metres of shelves that stand before the hapless visitors to my studio. Studio is a euphemism; it is more an industrial building. Something along the lines of Warhol’s factory. The problem has become worse since 1979, the year the period of “x-rays” began.
The particular technique used for these works calls for the use of sophisticated colours and special varnish which returns the original luminescence of the plate. Blessed Roentgen, accursed Roentgen. Precisely because they are luminescent they fear the light of the sun. The “X-rays”: nocturnal creatures that must be shaded by day. They are almost objects of Moldavian inspiration, but luckily do not fear artificial light and therefore can be exhibited without danger in interiors.
As Zannier wrote in “hunting for shadows” and for shade I must add. Here then are placed in large nylon sacks, protected beforehand with a layer of soft padding that lets them breathe and does not scratch the delicate final layer of varnish and then they are put in large cardboard boxes. But on careful analysis this series of operations is not enough. This is my recurring nightmare. Knowledge and sight are nothing but an infinite game of shadows… on the other hand I love nuances. The idea pursues the hope of a continuation; for a principle based on immortality.The x-rays were born of a research into new expressive means with which to visualise an essentially reflective work that could solve my personal interior need to find the spirit of man, and set the observer of my works before his own non-awareness of his imaginative capacities, his evocative capacities, the personal ability to observe, with the aim of giving him the possibility to discover that he is fully endowed if he can see oceanic atolls and Amazonian rivers in a skull, in a tibia.
Simplicity, immediacy and depth are reached if the colour acquires an intensity equal to that of the spirit with its primeval strength.
My continued experimentation, creative impulse and need for communication brought my work to new dimensions that allow me to create an incessant intermingling of light and shade and Leonardesque shadows with thought constantly turned towards the representation of exterior and interior life, of old and new, of infinitely large and infinitely small and it is only by passing through the representation of death that I managed to communicate life to seek the essence of truth. Rational or super-rational, lofty thought or elementary truth.
It was important for me not to confront the issue of figurative or non figurative: the x-rays are in fact both one and the other depending on the point of view, according to the state of mind of the observer in the moment he stands before the work, according to the human experience he has accumulated.Image, research, colour, everything came to me naturally and for this reason I think nothing is contradictory: in substance it all responds to an interior necessity. I sought a universal interpretation of the interior world in which the “secret of the unity of everything is enclosed”. Every form, image, landscape or cloud can be found inside us: the human body is the container of everything that can be seen in nature; at times in a muscle, at time in the lungs, other times in the oesophagus.
The mirror reflects the light, clearly visible in my canvasses, I went beyond, I penetrated the mirror and I found the form and inside the form, the essence of the soul.
The representation of this as immediate expression of the spiritual. Light as active ingredient of life, form as a deep introspection of the unconscious. My imaginative fertility brought me to sound the labyrinths of the spirit and the mind and I have x-rayed thought and existence so as to represent the whole using intimate images and light. A leap into the unknown that was considered known, in search of the truth: and it is here that I see what I feel and what I am.
A gaze that serenely contemplates the Void in its extreme extension; the absence or the excess of sentiment, which are after all the same … the complete domination of light impedes sight. Knowledge and sight are nothing but an infinite game of shadows… on the other hand I love nuances. The seventies and the sixties split the image cleanly, playing on violently opposed backgrounds, as if out of the need to offend…Not to recognise genius one has to be stupid.
Or too full of one’s self.
We are all only sand on the shore…I know of nothing on earth that is really useful and perhaps not even living is useful.
To make the worst arguments prevail is the specific objective of rhetoric, which I do not use.I do not like to write about what I think because I am not even sure that what I think is important: my way of thinking and expressing myself is painting.
Art criticism is exercised on objects with respect to which it is accidental … and until it becomes literature it is a merely descriptive, decorative element.
The trained eye prefers to investigate up close and alone, reveal rather than cover.Are you abstract or informal, or figurative… I have never considered the issue of being something precise, or better something that fits into those canons.
Lies are a different way of reaching the truth.
Pity is a gift that not all are able to give, and not all are able to receive.
Pain and death? The whole course and final horizon of human vicissitudes.Death is always our own personal death: even when others die, we simply feel our own death in them; or their death in us… of all the things that are given to our senses, nothing lasts. And in the end nothing returns … A consolatory illusion, a veil spread out so as not to see… like most or all our actions what more … voluntary inebriation … and of no slight effect.
Art interferes, for ontological reasons, in human matters. It tells you one more time to look at things openly… and it offers you the perfume, the mirage of a harmony that perhaps exists… that exists perhaps for us, when our gaze ceases to be simply our gaze. A gaze that fills itself to the brim with life…
A gaze that becomes pure perception… because when you paint you do not know what you are doing and moments of judgement, when you construct the images for your painting in your mind, are moments that have nothing to do with painting… painting, you know, like knowledge is this game of light and shadow. Painting in this sense, is a manner of knowledge, it is extreme openness and willingness towards becoming, it comes directly from the structure of things… which then returns to the cosmos, in a hip, in the estuary of a great river, exceptionally similar.Without the intention of reaching a form, which in any case comes about, after attempts and countless hours, in an instant: faces, still or rough seas, lunar or terrestrial landscapes, visions of the sky or the heavens… and if you observe, other images appear within the images, lesser but equally defined. The mind returns this agglomeration of colours and signs to a better-known or more coherent form through its own notions. Thus there is no intention or form of a face in the sum of these colours and in the plate, and there is no river in the pancreas of a man…
Art offers us a distance that is much more than sideral. Every artwork – as artworks count only masterpieces – is this point of union between finite and infinite, or better this manifestation of the infinite in the finite, which is therefore the Mystery of the Incarnation of the Christ. Which is therefore the mystery of our possibility to affirm something true, without however being able to verify it: a matter of intuition…
The problem of individual conscience: if it exists or not and how it can be presented, being distinct and perceptive, in the uninterrupted continuum of becoming. Conscience is justified by freedom, but it has no sense outside the concept that reality is an absolutely full, complete mechanism. In this case art is also a matter of conscience!There was once a river in the pancreas of a man, and then also mountains in a spinal column and an entire galaxy in an eye…see how it happens? They have had x-ray plates in their hands for a hundred years and they have seen nothing but fractures… Often those who look do not see, and those “see” do not look…
From the same plate I have obtained series of eight completely different paintings… the painting is obtained with colour. The plate is not sign it is light. The work is completed before it is enjoyed, but to let the others enjoy it is like sitting them down at a banquet of delights. The creator and the work are two distinctly different things, and the latter is the better, because the creator has given his best and perhaps not only his own… And the fact remains that the creator hopes to continue living in his work.
Meneghetti. Why filmmaker, actor, painter, sculptor, architect, designer, adman, musician? Who knows if Meneghetti really exists!
2002
I loved only one woman called painting.
The colour of a flower changes continuously as it dies. The same is true for my canvasses.
As god I gave it life, time will give it death.
It is born, lives, withers, dies.
Like life everything comes to death.
Not from photography to painting, but from painting to photography. Not from cinema, from sculpture, from music, from design, from theatre, from performances, from architecture to painting, but from painting to everyting.
Not from science to painting, but from painting to science, to technology, to computers.
I was born a painter and I remain a painter even outside of painting!
I think my works explain a lot, not only about me.
It is he who encourages you to take off the mask to make life more acceptable.
Let us look inside ourselves, we will become better.
I am speaking to you about yourselves and you do not even listen to me, you do not see me.
“Expectations”
Fear and dreams.
Like the Ouroboros, a constant circle of life and death, thus the spinal column becomes a monster, master of our daily desert.
The madness of a father, of a son, of a system, of a people who kill the others and themselves, and the image is the omen of the End.
2003
Let us try with God too, you never know.
My ambition has greatly exceeded my talent and I no longer find white horses nor beautiful women at my doorstep.
My works, a metaphor of the most wretched human condition: neither earthly nor heavenly, suspended in limbo, with neither beginning nor end.Dear Francesco, you will outlive me, but I, no thanks to you, will outlive you.
