THE OBSCURE BODY OF COLOUR
edit by Manlio Brusatin

It is curious that the birth of cinema, thanks to the Lumière brothers, coincided with the discovery of x-rays by Conrad Roentgen. 1895 marks the birth of what we call society of the image and of what has become now more clearly the reading of the unconscious, or better the non visible, that which is (not) hidden by our body. Later in the twentieth century cinema became an exterior, universal observer that captured the imagination of the masses, while the mysterious ionised rays became an interior, individual vision of the human being, or rather of his too human being. Renato Meneghetti, artist, has taken this form, this technique of in-depth analysis as a means of telling the universal, individual story.

The artist is no longer “an author” marking his creations like sheep, but as an initiate permeated/perforated by invisible rays, with light and shadow, more shadow than light, he returns this instant, absolute transition of a light without light recorded on a plate as if by a soul. Telling everything of it and its body.
To record this shower of light we must know how to return to the spaces within the Gothic cathedral and perhaps to the Gnostic spirit. Here, immersed in the deluge of choirs, in the nave of the cathedral, man was almost soaked by the light of the stained glass windows into which he was submerged as if by the iridescent water of a cascade. This coloured light pierced him, blending with his spiritual convictions, anagogically the body and soul returned to the original, divine light.

Over the last twenty years of this century Meneghetti’s works have been a continuum of cinematic-graphic-photographic experiences, modern and very antique techniques, steeped in the magic plastic film transfer of the optic chamber, and also in those real stained-glass windows that he exalts even with nocturnal manifestations (Progetto di installazione per il Millennio della città di Bassano del Grappa ). His works have hidden origins that escape the traditional milestones of art history but they are essential in the history of images created to by viewed.
The eighteenth century, the century of etching and graphics, revealed new sides even to modern publishing. The Remondini brothers put popular collections of hand-coloured prints into circulation along with their books, poor lacquers and xylographs and games in primary colours.
From the city of Bassano, which has become the time and place Meneghetti, the Tessini, messengers of the printing press, sent a new universe as far as Saint Petersburg and Moldavia, the places of sleepless nights and blood, at least to our imagination.
There were graphic techniques used in the eighteenth century but that have been since abandoned or forgotten because of applicaticìve difficulties, that seem to be the material precusors of Meneghetti's workings. For example mezzotint, which is similar to photographic black, engraved on a plate with a very close system of incisions and used to reproduce nocturnal landscapes that would be impossible to reproduce by traditional etching.

This method is also known as «manieranera» and is a technique before being a style. It is the point of departure that was used, by means of four different plates (black, blue, yellow and red) long before any four-coloured reproduction, to create the first coloured prints. Given their unusual appearance, this printing method was used almost exclusively for producing anatomic atlases or maps of human and animal muscles. It was stolen by Jacques-Fabien Gautier from the unfortunate Jacob Christoph Le Blon to assemble a treatise called Myologiecomplette en couleur (1745-48) that was of interest only to experts with the exception of one image: Woman seen from behind, sectioned from the nape to the sacrum. Such a title could create the unhappy effect of an autopsy if it were not for Jacques Prévert who displaced this image, taking it away from its original time and renaming it: The anatomic angel.

It is a surrealist interpretation thanks to a specific remark: «une jolie femme aux épaules nues o plutôt dénudées avec la peaurabattue de chaque coté... Horreur e splendeur viscerales». Visceral horror and splendour – writes Prévert. Horrendous splendour and splendid horror, which becomes a very suitable critical oxymoron for Meneghetti’s two-sided works. But these images have regained a colour that is both primary and original. Starting out from the «maniera nera» which is simply that which light has become passing through the greater and lesser obstacles of the body. We are dealing with plates , as we have said, and this word can evoke both that which can cover a body and that which can reveal hidden salvation.

Meneghetti’s material, his total plates are also saved by chromatic shading and backgrounds, that restore them to their original bodies: be it in the living and fossil portrait of a perch and a sardine (Ritratto di pesce persico e sardina, 1999) or the lunar portrait of Renato (1/4, 1/3, 3/4, intero, cranio di Renato , 1996), that is reborn in a moment almost with the effect of a shroud, it is as much a real icon as it is a daily divinity. Also the Aborigines spontaneously drew fish or other animals with a technique that we, today, would call x-ray-like, to set the image in what they called the age of dream, that immaterial place where all body forms come from and to which everything will return.
Like Ulysses who departs and returns (but does not know if he will return) one becomes a man ploughing «wine coloured» seas (Ritratto di Ulisse nell’Egeo I II III IV V VI, 1997 ), knowing how to forget rather than how to remember, to find again the path home alongside the green-blue colours of the long abandoned island.

The dark divinity Proserpina is also seen approaching, present in Hades and she too has two faces, in the light of events (Ritratto di Proserpina negli Inferi , 1997 and Ritratto di Proserpina nella luce , 1997). Two-faced, unmasked down to the bone, and can be looked at for a long time, not like two things that the philosophers said could not be looked at too intensely: death and the sun.

Art always returns to its beginning. From the desert a city is born, either a buried city or the city of nomads. The innervated canvass of veins and roots or of magnetic fields titled Ritratto di Leonardo nel Sahara (1997), brings to mind, like a nearby echo, a message that Leonardo sent out to artists in his Libro di Pittura :
Do not despise this opinion of mine, when I tell you that it is not bad at times to stop and see the marks, on walls, or in the ashes of the fire, or clouds or mud, or other such places, where, if you only but consider them, you will find marvellous inventions, that spark the genius of the painter to new creations either the composition of battles, of animals, of men, or the parts of towns or monstrous things, like devils or other such beings, it will be to your honour; because in confused things the mind finds new invention. But first, make it your task to know how to well reproduce the members of that which you want…

For those who know how to see and understand, Painting becomes, in its every expression, a system of dissolution and concentration in an “almost eternal return” that can be contemplated only from the observatory of art and poetry. In these images that have been taken in their pulsating deformity the ways of art appear, paths that are interrupted so as to open into a clearing that is never exactly the same. Here among the wayfarers we can recognise Gustav Klimt, Costantin Brancusi, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí and Jim Dine whom Renato Meneghetti re-visits in his ecto-plastic conformations that do not give up a conceptual presumption but rather become magic material (Omaggio all’uomo diNeanderthal , 1998) so as to speak with our more distant likes, the other and the other again that we do not know in ourselves.

Manlio Brusatin