ESSENCE AND SENSES
edit by Richard Gregor

In the preface to his short study on the work of Renato Meneghetti, Pierre Restany stated, “Meneghetti is foremost a man of his time.” This pertinent contention precisely expresses the feeling received by the viewer through the scope of this Italian artist’s work – ranging from painting and sculpture, through installation and action, theatre, film, architecture and design, to music composition. During the “Renaissance” 1960s, the time when Meneghetti entered the art scene, this was very much dominated by efforts at going beyond the established borders of visual arts – not only by a basic postulation of the new positions but also in the sense of interconnecting existing positions in intermedia production, progressing up to today. For Meneghetti, the inspiration of the period entails a pronounced impulse: he verifies and tests expressive trends that have emerged on the world scene, either simultaneously or successively, since the end of World War II (and, in some cases, they oppose each other from the viewpoint of development). The absorption of pluralistic positions of art provides space for the later typological heterogeneity of the artist’s efforts, in which a common linkage may be discovered – an attempt to grasp essence in his work with a new archetypal rule carried by an individual and individuality.

In Meneghetti, the first coherent creative phase is the response to the structural tendencies of European Informel, which he developed around 1965. If we admit that Informel (along with geometric tendencies) is one of the pinnacles of abstract art, and in the direct line of the evolution of material production to surpass it basically means to negate it for the impossibility of further development, the inclination of the young artist for this dynamic and at the same time metaphysical position is logical and justified. For him, the typical fuzziness of picture structuring planes is primarily a synthesis and material layering; later, in a phase of seeking a resolution for this model, he makes use of a principle contrary to layering – an analysis of accidental (or discovered) shapes. Such a shift in approach during his continual work with some of the media employed, recurrent in his work, is not only significant in formal morphology but also relates to a view of the essence of the work itself in some series. In his later production, the artist even combines these two approaches within a single work, thereby denying a constant view of a single trend in the visual arts in a fascinating way. This structural phase is a short episode, but it is probably Meneghetti’s first contact with the borderline position of art on a two-dimensional surface; moreover, it is such a position which more than ever before shifted the focus of the classical (traditional) genre to underlining the creative process and to an art trace of a different type (automatic and at the same time consciously influenced), which may be found as residual interest in his later dramatic works.

Even in his collages, which according to primary dating fall within the same period as structural monotypes, the conflict between the counter-positions of the period is apparent: residual abstraction, persisting as a value supported by its own universality and its opposite – the tempting culture of mass idealization (Pop art), as a direct response to the hyperintellectualization of the previous trend and a synonym for the attitude of the young generation of the 1960s to life. Meneghetti’s collages lie on the borderline – they arise from one position and enter another. The interesting position of the layered decollages by their nature support both: the previous method of formal intervention into existing or created matter (in paper découpage) and a base, which already speaks in a different language. This shift in focus by Meneghetti will be of great importance with respect to form, and to some extent constant; nevertheless, his relentless effort to discover the essence will remain equally strong. At this point, we may propose a model to define Meneghetti using two coordinates: essence in any category, and an attack on the senses, i.e. an expressive visual dimension dominating in his works, regardless of their nature, size or character. The next work is subject to this double strategy in both individual aspects and their details; the active polarity of relationships primary defined by visual means – light and shape, is achieved by layering.

A pure and non-refracted Pop-art colour range appears in Meneghetti along with a clarifying of figurative formal conceptions, which the artist does not reject (as might be expected after the informal experience), but on the contrary, he comes to them this way too. The purity of the colour tones reflect the disposing of pathos and a straightforwardness and, moreover, strongly negate the mood, literally cleansing a painting of it, as a useless and empty element (Meneghetti maintained this rule on a two-dimensional surface until the 1990s). Before accepting the figure, he undergoes a period of Pop-art abstraction in this vein, which appears as the crystallization of structural painting with marked fluency, supported by the long-term concept of absorption (fagocitare) as a reflection of the artist’s personal views. In the anatomisation and reduction of shapes, which may be briefly called an analysis of matter on a two-dimensional surface, first painted “sketches” of skeletons from multiplied (or at least chronically repeated) elements appeared in Meneghetti, and later were developed in an extensive, life-long series of radiographic works with the use of X-rays.

Some of the graphic scores are also based on the same morphology and point to another linear possibility of understanding the nature of the same visual material when implanted in a different context – in this case besides visual quality it is an evocation of a possible musical interpretation (exclusively subjective). It is a type of non-notational record, where individual signs do not have a sound rule defined precisely beforehand; therefore their aim is improvisation – instant and unrepeatable.

A radiographic search for the essence has noticeable conditions and anticipations with this artist, especially in the artist’s pure painting production. However, formal connotations may be detected in other seemingly incomparable positions. He analyses matter by means of fragmentation into constructional elements with different levels of mutual compatibility, which constitute a whole but at the same question its unity, so we realize the possibility of deformation and possible motion, underlined in the textual parts of these works. For Meneghetti, Radiographs do not possess scientific attributes; they are, above all, an examination of form and the basis for superior interests of a purely visual character. Their constructional character is given beforehand – the artist supports and shows its plastic nature and the aforementioned possibility of deformation by inserting colour planes (like sides cut out of a cardboard model).

He makes use of an appropriated radiogram (the whole or a fragment) as the foundation, an ideational or compositional basis that determines not only the final shape but also the relationships inside the work. A radiogram is static – and therefore in the picture the role of a base, a basis, may be easily assigned to it; from the position of the artist’s method in creating artwork, it is at the same time the first step from which he draws further inspiration. The static character is upset by other compositional elements in various combinations, from poignancy of expression to meaningful symbol – the result is a certain non-physical lifelikeness, whose magical pulse vibrates in the interspace connecting the identifiable nucleus with the shell of the formal surface in overemphasized colourfulness, sometimes seen as if through ultraviolet radiation. An X-ray possesses autonomous visual qualities, whose essence may be considered archetypal from a certain perspective. In addition, it has specific light – Meneghetti qualitatively appropriates it, perhaps more than an image of the skeleton; this appropriated light could be called ready-light, i.e. light which is a precondition and the determinant of a work of art owing to the operation of its own qualities and meanings, and in the case of X-rays also predetermined ones. The artist positions the acquired light in the centre and assigns it the function as the starting point for the picture, a place to which he returns after passing the circle of other expressive elements. The series of works from the early 1990s up to today presented in the current exhibition is also carried in this vein.

The exhibition consists of paintings for hanging (painted with alcohol on canvas), simulated stained glass panels, objects and installations. Meneghetti uses them to refer in a vigorous manner to the most authentic materialization of his visual thinking, to a position he has been systematically developing for several decades. Installations and also stained glass panels have a precisely defined and intended effect on the viewer. This “finality” of theirs arises especially from the dramatic quality of the fact that the degree of other artistic interventions in Meneghetti’s works has been recently reduced, that their effectiveness is more and more bound to the basic X-ray shape and base colour. The absence of other meaningful details contributes to their emotiveness (possibly even drastic in its way) – a factor the artist almost did not develop in the past. The reduction in the degree of interventions and the grouping of individual parts into larger wholes at the same time speak of deeper analytical thinking about the meaning of these parts; on the other hand it follows and indicates a difference in the artist’s visual language over recent years – the stained-glass panels and installations may be perceived as simulated light-boxes.

The large paintings, markedly different in character, may be placed in contrast to this group of works. While in light installations the manipulation with the base is reduced, thereby a certain autonomy of the subject and expression is granted to the essential constituent of the work of art – a work of art assumes the sense by the aforementioned grouping and composition of elements – the intervention appears in a different, anti-conceptual sense in the new paintings. In these, Meneghetti interprets detail as a formal inspiration to which he metaphorically assigns some other accidental or intentionally discovered meaning. He supports this turn by adding a lyrical quality to the colour range, thereby rehabilitating the formerly rejected and suppressed mood, and in some cases even narrative symbol, which may be understood as an exploration of the other possibilities which this homogenous and yet considerably organized series offers.

The counter-position of essence versus emotion and effect is probably the key duel the artist is fighting. On the one side there is universal quality and validity (which, by the way, is substantiated by Meneghetti’s deliberation on architecture – functions relieved of any deposits), while on the opposite side there is temperament, an effort at an effect in a well-thought-out attack on the viewer’s sight. This interesting duel is metaphorically best reflected in his neo-constructivist figures (in different variations) – it is a conflict of the corporeal and finality with extreme universality.

Richard Gregor