THE BODY DIMENSION
edit by Marco Goldin

What we see is not what is actually there: all we are doing is putting what we see in a new place that we have not tried out before. We see what appears, but we want to see what does not appear, because appearance also means the dis-appearance of what stays hidden. Hence life does not come from reality as a pure and simple manifestation of the phenomena we feel: what it is is uninterrupted fascination, its end is nothing other than dis-appearance into the cosmos, no sense or idea of confines or any point we can home to. In fact, life is a stringent force, poetic, with its own navigation in space, silent through both light and night, timeless.

Ten years ago, when Renato Meneghetti entered, with exquisite gentleness, into more allusive, less declared painting, what he was experiencing was that night. And as the years passed and his work went on, he got further and further into this work so that the depth is the only subject he paints. So things stood, more or less, at the end of 1995 with the last phase of his research, using X-rays of single parts of the human body, deliberately searching for transparence, and, again, the dis-appearance of reality.
This is the starting point. It is first ulterior knowledge and only then knowledge. There is no stopping in front of sensible forms but overcoming them like a charm with a vision protracted in time, not instantaneous but, in fact, astonishing and unlimited. And it is immediately Meneghetti’s decision to give us the measure of his intention starting out from what is already the known become unknown, indeed from a kind of prehistory of vision, a cleansing of the body, stripped, unmasked, freed of the duties of the flesh, reduced to the bone, a measure of the eternity in all of us. And this measure is only just lines, outline, and already there is shadow, reflection, mystery. Here then is this world that announces itself from afar and then takes up the foreground, bringing out the characteristics of extremely varied movement, of an unplumbable flood of light.

No choice that sets out with such premises is to be underestimated and it would do us so harm to insist on this for a moment yet, also because Meneghetti apparently distances himself from it, touching on areas of unconfined size which are nonetheless inner spaces, more the passages of the spirit than a descent into any kind of naturalism. But, at the beginning here there is dust, or better bone walls, ground up or waiting to be ground up, the line a sign of life before death. Appearance, the last consistency before the boat comes to carry us over. And the sea lies before us, the night sea, the dark that takes you by the throat and swallows you up. Life becomes no more than a tattoo, the scar of us when we are no longer there, or here. It is our mark left on the shroud, a white sheet that bears our effigy, what is left of the flesh that is no longer to be seen. Then there are eyes, single hands, hands clasped, eye-sockets, even skulls. As in an anatomy treatise, Meneghetti, from his considerable experience also as a film maker, runs image after fleeting image, with fearsome speed, before our eyes, everything overtaken by time, nothing spared. And it is time that is the protagonist of these scenes from within.

Meneghetti’s way of preparation is all based on this construction placed on time before everything goes under. In his dryness of line, in its hollowed-out majesty, before, indeed, it becomes dust and ashes. And this impalpable grey ash is dusted around the vibrant line of the bones and around the unforeseen and unforeseeable light that is like the blush of a precocious dawn. Meneghetti prepares the song on the face of the waters of eternity using one idea of reality that is extremely modern, strictly essential, as if these X-rays were not the fabric of reality but its structure, hinging on the remains of what was once life.
Seen from here, the work of this painter, so singular, is like an all but desperate dream-intervention that tries to operate on life before it becomes death and breath goes out of it. This is a great survival scene, a reconsideration of the world before its forms decline. But, fleshless, with only the skeleton there, the skeleton becomes essence and the point from which there is nothing else left to start from.

So it is not by chance that Meneghetti has chosen to work with fleshless elements of this kind, starting from zero in life, a story reduced to point and line, an almost Klee-like assonance of one who lives just as well amidst the born as the unborn, one who passes over the soul living where night reigns and where it is a miracle when the light comes. And to find this light? It is like the water of the baptismal font, the new alpha of a new life and this artist has made it walk, a Wanderer who, rather than amidst the green Alps moves among the meanderings of an intestine no longer to be seen or the composed shards of a shinbone. A wanderer in the absolute: he goes out to meet the night with only his painting to light it and create an event of conscience and consciousness alike.

This is the significance that painting has for Meneghetti. It is not only vision but above all intimacy with destiny because, after all, nothing is more autobiographical than facing death from the side of life, looking at when the light fails. And it is significant that he uses painting like a sword, with which to defend himself and forge ahead, repelling the shades and ghosts, defending himself against cold and hunger and keeping death, lurking in the dryness of these encroaching shadows of the unknown on the X-ray plate, at bay. But Meneghetti, the painter, possesses the inestimable rights of the art. He has no other means of defence, but does have this one that few (if any) can excell. Thus, with this temerity, challenging the unknown with the cloak of his destiny around him, he paints on these X-rays. He colours this luminescent world that appears or he changes it into something else. A new painting thus emerges with its own silences, as yet unheard.

Like a cornfield in the immense Sicilian night, like the moon over a sea that is not a sea but only the sky that can’t be seen any more, pitch black and a place of abandon.
(I am writing the last part of this article in Sicily where I have diligently brought my Texas portable and conclude this text between one inauguration and another. From this warm and friendly part of Italy, I see the work of Meneghetti, who is so far from here, suddenly very differently. Certainly, looking around his Bassano studio, I have always upheld his fascinating ideas of landscape. But now, after coming home last night through the fields of maturing grain, I have the idea that Meneghetti’s landscapes have a multiplicity of images of the infinite because they derive from shade and light and night with all its images up to the very limits of day.

Nothing happens by chance and we never go anywhere without something dawning in our heart, and before it does, happening in front of our eyes. Hence, looking again at this Sicily that I love as if it were my own, and with whom I have a rapport of intimacy that I find all but undescribable, for the first time I see this land not as in a bright, majestic, blinding light, but suffused by transparencies, flowering algae, intermittencies in sign and memory. Maybe it was the sudden shower of rain that caught us before we got to the country paths that go to Sampieri and the sea, after Piero’s house and before Franco’s, but the water on the road and the colour of night, brought these latest pictures of Meneghetti’s back to mind, certainly more beautiful, those where he has come to his full precision, where the sense of dispersion within time has become something of an obsession).

These visual images which are not images but which arise out of an emptiness that is deeper even than silence, shake the spirit. They show a ragged progression of paint along the fibres, flashes of light and clouding of knowledge. One thing does become another and another again, as by now we can no longer see as know what we left. And perhaps this is what brings me closest to Renato Meneghetti’s work: the idea that this very moon is not sailing in the cobalt sea of the teeming heavens but in the starless blackness of a perennial night. There, in that worn-our space where light no longer reflects, as the moon reflects it in her sad song, living it in the eternal not as in one entiry of disappearing time but as within ourselves, as a barely perceptible variation of an effacement of everything.

This painting’s strenght, then, lies in a balance between disappearing and being. It speaks only through colour and is at its best doing it through near-monochromatic tones, chaste, Franciscan, even penitential — when it touches the heart of the world with simple phrases and all the evaporating of clouds and smoke is the substance of destiny.

Having started, and we have all but forgotten this, from X-rays of the human body, Meneghetti has distanced himself from that body to plumb the depths of an inaccessible region from whose bourn he returns with eyes either clouded or closed for the strong light and the even stronger night. The more he looks with an inner eye, after that eternal night, the sweeter and more harrowing is his song, as of one who, once shipwrecked, unexpectedly, and outside the bounds of all reason, finds land again.

Marco Goldin