Over the years Meneghetti has stood out as a prodigious innovator and inexhaustible creator of ideas, which though always different are still united by strong, tireless moral. During the initial phase of his career his intellect seemed even too expansive, risking a loss of direction because of the excess, almost, of proposals that flowed continuously from his decisive and all-inclusive temperament.
What happened, however, was the exact contrary. Meneghetti at once managed to channel this sort of creative turbulence, which has always been and always will be a trait of his, within a series of “guiding ideas” so that he never lost sight of the essential.
Critical literature dealing with him rapidly provided a response worthy of his cyclopean output. Distinguished interpreters have dedicated in-depth study to the various stages of his work, grasping the profound meaning of his creation, they have pinpointed, often with sharp clarity, his relevance on the contemporary artistic scene.
This volcanic component, which compels the artist towards a hyperbolic dimension, clearly emerges from the studies carried out on his work. That Meneghetti identified, earlier and better than most, the direction towards which destiny was to lead many creators of our time is without question, and it is extraordinary that he was the first, the evidence speaks clear, to investigate the x-ray, through which he has led an entire art concept on the relationship between art and nature.
It was inevitable that an artist such as Meneghetti who, to use a sort of sports metaphor, jumped the gun - but was recognised immediately and adequately considered - should always stand in an avant-garde position in relation to the times that gradually unfolded before him. It is not that Meneghetti can be assigned to the by now age-worn concept of “avant-garde artist”; but it is a fact that being at the forefront was a natural condition for him seeing as he has never sought effect for effect’s sake but always expressed that which pressed him from within with an almost sacred sense of the necessity of art, which, if it were not so, would not exist.
It has been said of him that he is a endless mine of ideas and that he has always privileged, wavering between abstract and figurative like very few artists today, the communicative value of the artwork to the point that many of his inventions have also become, later, and in other hands, tools for the language of advertising.
There is a tension in the works of Meneghetti that could be defined Dantesque. As in the works of the great poet his works seem to have been touched by “both heaven and earth” and his passion, indeed, ranges from the straightforward world of the Four Elements to the gigantic installations that constitute a sort of huge separate chapter of his output which truly displays, with the strength and power of a struggle between the author and his own materials, his quest to reach a destination that continuously evades him and is yet continuously desired. Through a highly effective critical formula Bonito Oliva investigates the horizons of Meneghetti, explaining how this impetuous man incessantly recreates, within the concept of his work, the very origins of creativity. This is a thesis which defines to some extent the whole complex personality of an artist who effectively escapes any attempt at definition, and Bonito Oliva points this out clearly when he explains how Meneghetti actually constructs while destroying the object of the unconscious. Here we descend to the root of the issue of x-ray images, which stand as an authentic monument within the vastness of the artist’s thinking.
Effectively, Meneghetti’s art is a formidable investigation sounding the primary factors of existence. Nobody is further than him from any form of hedonism or reassuring, pacifying concept of art.
And yet precise physical grappling with his works constitutes an incomparable aesthetic experience because this art, in its making and appearing, reflects itself and represents itself, or at least, represents a quintessence that needs to be sought exploring the interior, that is what is profoundly and totally true, but yet cannot be seen or understood without that leap that the artist forces us to take. In this sense Meneghetti stands as a daring seeker of the aesthetic dimension per se and certain counterparts sustained by historians, from time to time, in an attempt to delineate his creativity, from Magritte to Leonardo da Vinci, do not seem inappropriate.
In fact several great artists, throughout history, have attempted to draw forth the secrets of Nature so as to reach the roots of all things and Meneghetti is one such artist following in an ancient tradition, using instruments that are totally his and without really being in debt to anyone, so much so that his work, seen as a whole, could realistically aspire to a sort of paradoxical classicism, if we mean “classical” as the intention to give a complete aesthetic form to the most profound and noble aspirations originating from a meditated knowledge of what is real, filtered through a highly particular sensibility, and capable of speaking to anyone who is willing to listen to the deep voices of Being.

Claudio Strinati