THE SECRET STRUCTURE
edit by Laura Cherubini

It seems, right from the beginning, that to reveal the secret nature of things is the dominant drive in Renato Meneghetti’s pictorial research. The Lavandaia of 1954 and Ho visto il mare of the following year lay bare shreds of nature, La tavola dello zio Nino of 1959 is a close observation of a fragment of a table, some Monotipi seem to anticipate the Radiografie, the collages present themselves as a stratification of fine and fragile epidermis, and with the frescoes on panel the material texture is exhibited and underlined.

Cannibalism Already in the Sixties a cycle entitled Fagocitatrici was born. The only possible thing to do to live in the world is perhaps to let oneself be eaten. Meneghetti outlines a sort of oral phase in painting. The oral phase is a fundamental stage in the first period of life of a baby, the mouth being one of the principal organs where access is gained to the body’s innermost feelings.

‘The pleasure that one feels in being nursed is closely connected to some emotional attitudes. The main sensation probably consists in the safety felt due to the relaxation brought about by the satisfaction of one’s hunger. This sensation together with that of being looked after is linked to the act of assimilation and the pleasure which resides in the mucus of the mouth. Originally, these oral sensations are recognised in a completely passive way. The mammary gland is made of an erect tissue and spurts milk into the baby’s mouth. It is correct, therefore, to call assimilation or oral secretion, the whole complex of these emotions and the pleasure thus located’.

(Franz Alexander, Fundamental Elements of Psychoanalysis). It is known that primitive peoples ate their enemies in order to internalise their qualities. This even happened to the explorer doctor Livingstone: on his death his two most faithful servants ate his organs to assume his strength and courage. In fact, some have even upheld, misinterpreting the essence and meaning, an incredible figurative example of cannibalism, the Eucharist in the catholic religion, whereby the priest repeats, with reference to the wine and bread, the words of Christ: ‘Take and eat this all of you for this is my body, take and drink this all of you for this is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins’. For the prodigy of transubstantiation the believer has to have faith in the fact that the consecrated host is effectively the body of Christ as in fact the priest repeatedly calls it placing it in the mouths of the community gathered together.

Even literature is dotted with references to cannibalism: in Decamerone by Boccaccio there is the novel of messer Guglielmo Rossiglione who, jealous of messer Guglielmo Guardastagno, kills him and gives his heart to his wife to be eaten, but connected to food there are also the novels of Nastagio degli Onesti and of Chichibio and the crane. In fairy tales there emerges the image of a mother-witch or a father-ogre who devours: Hansel and Grethel and Little Red Riding Hood come to mind. Hansel and Grethel appears as a tale of great fear, that of hunger: the parents are worried that they have no more food for their own children, the children are convinced that their parents want them to die of hunger, the birds eat the crumbs that Hansel had scattered, preventing them from finding the way home, the starving children eat the edible house and the witch wants to eat them: ‘The witch, who is the personification of the destructive aspects of gluttony, has the same tendency to devour the children who go to demolish her marzipan house’ (Bruno Bettelheim, Il mondo incantato, The Enchanted World). Also in Little Red Riding Hood the central theme is the threat of being devoured.

‘A charming and innocent little girl swallowed by a wolf is an image which remains indelibly imprinted on the mind. In Hansel and Grethel the witch only intended to devour the children; in Little Red Riding Hood both the grandmother and the little girl are literally swallowed by the wolf’ (Bettelheim). The literary story of this fable begins with Perrault’s version which lacks however the happy ending, and in fact a great scholar of fables, Andrew Lang observes that if all the versions of Little Red Riding Hood finished in that original way, they could be discarded, whereas the brothers Grimm version has become one of the most popular fairy tales. In mythology we have the legend of Cronos who devours his own children: Zeus is saved because his mother substitutes him with a stone.

The Encyclopedia of psychoanalysis by J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis concerning ‘Cannibalistic’ recites thus: ‘Term used to qualify some objective relations and phantoms corresponding to oral activity, with reference to cannibalism practised by various populations. The term vividly expresses the different dimensions of oral incorporation: love, destruction, internal conservation of oneself and appropriation of the qualities of the object eaten’. That is why therefore the beliefs of primitive peoples are confirmed in psychoanalysis.
It is this which Sigmund Freud in person explained in Totem and Tabu, ‘[…] by ingesting parts of a person’s body in the act of devouring, the properties which belonged to that person become also a part of our own’ and more specifically: ‘One day the brothers […]. reunited, killed and devoured their father, in this way putting an end to the primitive hoard […] In the act of devouring they identified with him, each making his own a part of his strength’.

Phagocytize: this verb doesn’t really exist in the dictionary. There is however a masculine noun phagocyte (from the Greek fagein, eat, and chitos, cell) and the definition is as follows: ‘Generic name of animal cells circulating in the blood, which incorporate waste and micro-organisms and digest them’.
X-rays
The continuous changes in Renato Meneghetti’s work are not signs of experimentalism, even if a picture of 1981, created using the corrosion of enamel on polystyrene, is entitled Esperimento I, they are however products of the obsession with the idea of death which spreads over all his work. Some pictures of acetate mounted on panels, Parti di fagocitato 16°, Spina dorsale di un fagocitato and Parti di fagocitato 24° all of 1979, show dismembered bodies reduced into pieces that in some ways anticipate the Radiografie work. Amongst his first works in this style Ritratto di Anna and Occhio fagocitato both of 1981, are still signed with the initials ‘MRilfagocitato’.

Originally, in all these works, there is always a true X-ray which is transferred onto a cloth using a concealed and secret process of pressure/impression. Onto this base are then applied colours. The chromatic element takes effect in such a definite and consistent way that, at the end, the human body becomes completely transformed into an earthly or cosmic landscape. This procedure seems therefore directed at revealing a secret structure of things, as do many procedures of Surrealism, from frottage by Max Ernst to rayograph by Man Ray. In fact this latter example is perhaps the closest, also considering the process analogous to that of X-ray, an image obtained by contact. In this way, in the same vein as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made which consists of the sample and of the pure, simple and direct presentation of the object, the internal structure of things is revealed.

Here is how Man Ray himself tells of the invention of ready-made considering the actual meaning of the word, to discover something already implicit in the premise: ‘During the night I developed the X-rays I had exposed and the evening after I printed them […]. I put the big negatives in glass on a sensitive piece of paper which happened to be on the table. I turned on the red lamp, hanging from the ceiling, for a few seconds, then I developed the negatives. It was during the developing process that I discovered the procedure for making my Rayographs, photographs without a camera. Under the negatives, between the sheets of printing paper which had already been exposed, there was one blank one.

I exposed it to the light, together with a lot of other sheets which I later developed. I waited in vain for a few minutes for the image to appear; then regretting having spoiled the paper, I automatically placed a glass funnel, the graduated measure and the thermometer on the wet sheet of paper. I turned on the light: right before my eyes the image was beginning to take shape. It wasn’t dealing only with the simple outline of the objects but the objects resulted deformed and reflected by the glass which had been in major or minor contact with the paper; the part directly exposed to the light stood out like a relief on a black background’ (Self-portrait).

In this manner the eye can see what normally it cannot read. In Autoritratto al chiaro di luna of 1989, the face of the moon is contemplated, in Autoritratto in Quaresima (1989) the bone structure is illuminated by a sudden gleam. In Microtac Gold, in tasca dell’impermeabile (1992) a landscape of objects is depicted. Then ‘intestine portraits’ begin to take over Renato Meneghetti’s pictures. One of the sustaining structures of these works is that within the human body there is the sustaining column: the vertebral column. The skeleton is the bone structure visible to the X-rays.

The human body continues to be the object of the investigations in Carrozzerie umane carried out with three dimensional elements. Anxietas, the anxiety to communicate, the expressive urgency lead Renato Meneghetti to explore other fields such as architecture, design, cinema and the planning of the Museo dell’Automobile, his participation in the Cinema Festival, his work for the Advertising Agency, his activity with a Publishing House and even experience of restoration of seven Palladian villas.

His work as an artist remains greatly linked to the interior self, a spiritual and painful vision of the world, but I believe his interdisciplinary activity and his diverse experience in all these specialist sectors have reflected on his works most strictly artistic, in the sense of a coldness and detachment from themes and problems, for which reason the human body becomes investigated with a mechanical and electronic eye. A neutral glance combines thus with an existential anxiety and contributes to make this the threshold of language.

Laura Cherubini