EPIGRAPHS FOR LIGHT ONLY
edit by Marco Di Capua

‘Matter was radiation and divinity was silence, that which was in the middle was a mere trifle.’
(Gottfried Benn, The Ptolemaic)
This endless artistic world, overpopulated, clogged up, demented — an insane landscape, as thus it appears to the unaware who pass and who no one will ever dare send to the stakes — doesn’t on any account disdain images. And therefore, if the system of culture is presented above all, to the zenith of the purest of visibility, in the super production of an image not to scale, permanent and without mounting, which reality should be detached from this flow of figures in siege in which the magniloquence of that exhibited is equal to the catatonia of who observes?

Does a universe of images really exist which at the summit of its, in a word, tough figurative expression, can now do without us?
For example we believed that, at the origin of figurative art, lay a certain attachment to life. That art was the ‘immemoriale’ proof of man, in fact even of the body which adheres to the world. But unrealistic butchers, dissectors of cows and calves, experts of ostentatious blood tell us that it is not the case. And there is no longer gore, reserve or sacred horror of the bowels, all of which can stop them.

If you look at the great cycle of Radiografie which Renato Meneghetti has composed in the last decade you connect it, on instinct, to that tradition of anatomical fragment that starting from Géricault arrives, becoming a cynical fingerer of the poor dead people of the mortuary, to Serrano. And naturally you would put it nearer to the first rather than the second. Because, if all the things created by Meneghetti throughout his career are reconsidered, this his complex culture, in line with Leonardo (eclectic, impatient creativity practised up to the point of extravagance and which even seems to always act under a sole ray, under an unchangeable passion for the device) if, that is to say, all the disciplines are investigated, painting, sculpture (where the beaten face, the mutant from whom blood doesn’t trickle), design, architecture, theatre, performances, installations, above all lies the adaptation of the body to Modernity, to a technical world that requests of the body its dismembering, unhorsing, adaptation, but never negation, that inhumane violation that you see triumph gloomily everywhere. Whatever Meneghetti does, he always heads in a direction towards an energy that doesn’t fall.

So one appears in front of this phosphorescent charnel-house, this sumptuous baroque theatre of mortal remains under flickering lights and who knows why the following comes to mind Death caused by water in Eliot’s Waste Land: ‘Fleba the Phoenician, dead for fifteen days / Forgot the cry of the seagulls, and the deep whirlpool of the sea / And gain and loss/An undersea current / It stripped the flesh off his bones in murmurs. And while he was floating and sinking / He passed through the periods of maturity and youth / Proceeding into the vortex. // Gentiles and pagans / Oh you who turn the helm and look windward, Fleba consider, that long ago it was beautiful and tall like you’.
Therefore here are the themes raised: the discovery of an innocent condition of the body, free by this time of any aim or destiny. The names on the bottom, no longer with faces. Life left up there. A type of urging to pity. Literally: to compassion.

Meneghetti’s Radiografie are like epigraphs carved and expressed by a single light against the invasion of darkness. Voices arriving from a modern Hades, fragile and fervent, the world parallel to life as it actually is. They indicate another time, as according to Chateaubriand happened on some Norwegian islands, where ‘some sculptured urns with indecipherable characters are unburied. Who do these ashes belong to? The winds know nothing’. And then what would these investigations prove, investigations that so evidently expect clarity, intelligence, investigations carried out as if on the tracks of a secret to understand, to take away: the revealed force of Origin? Inside, Truth, Depth contrasted with Outside, Falsehood, and Superficial? Are we really convinced that we possess an inner self, a content?
Is it possible in this way to ransack a body hoping to find the glory of an ultimate, definitive explanation? (Here we have the hyperbole of Forbidden: we are prevented from looking in this way.) On which rib or shoulder blade is the soul therefore hung, pendent like a rag? Is it crouched down between the vertebra, or is it enclosed in the black cavity of the eye? Meneghetti knows only that everything is shape. Of shape he discovers and defends beauty wherever he can, and this according to him is our salvation. Here is the task.

If the body is equivalent to a Landscape (here it is evident the allusion to an inhabitable world, to an imaginary architecture, to the ghost of a land with its borders, hills and horizons) or to an Omen (health, illness picked up by lucidity of a seeing procedure) here language does everything to combat the fear which crosses it in gusts. In this way it eliminates from us the fear of the unaware, from us who are the pilgrims coming from without, for the sole fact of representing it, splitting this type of Guernica of the unknown body, of requiem sung above high, violent, ground notes. You can intend in this way a similar lethargic immersion, descending into your own physical sensations deeper and more secret right up to the point of creating visions of them. The only medication, cautious, soothing…

At the beginning therefore it seems that the body here is definitively snatched from desire, from freedom, positioned in the orbit of neutral thought, without echo and without anymore development. Meneghetti reveals to us — gesture opposed to a disclosure — that which we are not, what we don’t possess, or everything that had even intimately been our own which no longer belongs to us. Each portrait is here in fact an imitation not of an individual, of his personality, of his essence but that which escapes from him as if it were a shedding, a haemorrhage. Where have we gone who say ‘those are our bodies’?

This sounding lead of the deep body celebrates one of its very mysterious and fragile victories over inertia, over the opaqueness of existence, but then it heads immediately elsewhere. You perceive in this way bizarre, capricious masks, emissions and incarnations of the Nocturnal, of the Obscure. Isolated, mutilated, here are therefore parts of figures like constellations and flowers, individual plants that luxurious and defenceless in their beauty open only in the dark. Fantastical and unarmed animals, struck, for the first time, by our flash.

Each image, at last, seeks to expand its own life, a non psychological expression, a gesticulation not yet deciphered, as if the individual has been captured from an ecstatic, lost condition. Because at the bottom of its pure, absolute physicality, the body ignites and changes into spiritual energy. If it lives in a blind and mute world it’s only to relive the memory of the womb, of the Mother, that place where, as Pasolini says ‘I know that I was existing’. Next to this body, which lies between regret and clairvoyance, past and future simultaneously meet, God and Nothing meet: all the former does is present himself, each time, as the most perfect and inexplicable surrogate of the latter.

Marco Di Capua