A DEEPEST AND SPONTANEOUS SOCIAL INSTANCE
edit by Lucio Fontana

I know Meneghetti and his works. I have seen and admired the frescoes that were so very appreciated by Carlo Munari, excellent modern art critic, as well as an untiring researcher and appraiser of the youngest and most valid exponents of contemporary art. I knew, let me repeat, these works, in which a centuries-old technique practically seemed to be reborn under a hand that, in contact with new themes and conceptions, demonstrated itself to be sensitive to the problems and ispirations of the contemporary world.

I appreciated the courage with which the artist confronted and shattered, without any reticence or reserve whatsoever, tabu and hypocrisies so very dear to our society. This is why I agreed to examine his most recent works. And I did not regret my choice. These canvases still have that instinctive, marvellous sense of color, but there is something more. It is evident Meneghetti has thoroughly studied the experiences of the greatest exponents of contemporary art and, in particular, that he has assimilated, integrated and, perhaps, gone beyond them in his untiring research for a way that, while weighing on the experiments of the great artists that have preceded him, was still completely independent and at the same time capable of expressing a very personal conception of art and life. It is precisely here, on this clear representation of life and the society in which we live, that I intend to dwell because, beyond the forms, the works are valid in their content.

Every painting has a felt, spontaneous social aspiration. In our technocratic and agnostic time, in which there is more and more talk of freedom, Meneghetti feels that man is overwhelmed by the machine that he himself has created, and the new occult persuaders limit our faculty of choice in every second of our life, today more than ever. This is why he represents the individual or, better yet, the individual conscience, continually absorbed by the mass and by machines, in works in which real and unreal, conscience and subconscious have shattered every barrier and coexist in an atmosphere of rarefied and very personal vitality.

Machines are present in all of the works: monstrous and amorphous tubes, alive with their own mechanical life, that twist and absorb, in the black void of the mouths, the massified individuals that mingle in amorphous hoards of rags, or are grazed by a weak puff of vegetative life. I do not want to say more, but I am certain that our friends of Spotorno, Albisola, Savona and all of Liguria, like those that precede them in Lombardy and Tuscany, will welcome favorably the works of this young painter, who is now on his way to a positive and richly satisfying career.

(in the catalogue from the travelling exhibitions: Savona, Albisola, Spotorno, Novi Ligure, 1968)