BODIES OTHER
edit by Flaminio Gualdoni

Images can be born «through the breath, or even the exclamation, of the mind», said Emilio Villa. This is the clear vocation that Renato Meneghetti has been cultivating since the mid sixties, when he began, through a succession of experiences, the work that was to culminate in his most well-known series of Radiografie .

They were different experiences in terms of technique and experimental allure, products, not the products of a total Gesamtkunstwerk, but of a concern for capturing the sources of perception with whatever means art and technology would allow. Meneghetti is certainly curious, productive and richly inventive. But not so enamoured of the modal apparatus – be it the monotype or video- as to become their faithful, theoretically belligerent standard-bearer.

What interests him, is the awareness of being able to avail of the words and brushstrokes that best write the exclamations of his mind, the breath, at times feverish at times deep, that beat the rhythm, that unravel the excavation of his being, as lavish as it is agonic, vexed of images. Words and brushstrokes that he would have, as a rule, precise; capable, if ever, of reaching for something that lies somewhat on the other side, never on this side, of ordinary expectations, his own and those of the observer.
It is for others, then, to speak of the mundane objectification in this process. It is for others, moreover, to distinguish, to catalogue, to anatomise. Something else urges in its reading, and it is the red line that unwinds over the tempos and the differing modes of Meneghetti’s work: “the discourse” one would have said years ago, to which he has decided to anchor his great artistic wager.

Such a primary impusle is the reasoning of the body; or rather of body and identity, loss of body and loss of identity. Moving, at first, from clauses of a representative type, Meneghetti at once found himself questioning them, with his typical vision that is both caustic and laic: understanding well, at the same time, that the mediation between the notion of semblance and the stark motions of body and identity are the real trap in which every possible analysis becomes enmeshed
The likeness was to guarantee, mirroring symmetrically, the raison d’être of the image thanks to the individual, and the raison d’être of the individual thanks to the image. To sever such a deadly retorical, conventional knot, was and is, according to Meneghetti, to restore the solid polarity that allows one to articulate the world: that for which, by way of example, primitive man – but also the classical Greeks – held the simulacrum to be the thief of the living soul and the privileged vestige of divine identity, and modernity, in the fierce extremism of Warhol, made a substitute in toto of the living being itself.

Many diverse experiences throng the mind: de Chirico’s mannequin and the cast by Segal, the figures clawed with a rapacious gesture by Bacon and the playful skeletons by Schlemmer, Klien’s anthropometry shrouds and Costa’s antropological tables, the casts by Nauman and the living sculptures by Manzoni… many, diverse; the opposites of Warhol’s stars, of Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto by Paolini and likeness made anonymous in Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio by Vaccari: all sharing a common identity in the body’s role of firsthand agent, its substantial, ineluctable, congenital and inseparable quality.

Already works such as Dissolversi and Quo vadis, 1964, or Sdoppiamento , 1965, show that the way is this, corroborated by entire problematic series such as Fagocitazionie Radiografie : which are, firstly, portraits (and consider, in parallel, the periodic reappearance of the issue of the self-portrait, taking on a perfectly congruent value in Meneghetti, of what is being said), portraits whose first step consists of the undeniable physical evidence: just as conventional, and socially bureaucratic as Manzoni’s treatment of the signature and the fingerprint; just as indirect as is Kawara’s “I’m still alive” or Boetti’s letter, just as real, as anthropologically radical, as is the cast of Carrozzerie umane and the bone outlines in Radiografie (for which one cannot but recall, for artful but suggestive affinity, a passage from a letter by Vorstell precisely to Claudio Costa: “a fish has a nervous system that is more noteworthy than the electronic system of a television set”, much more pertinent indeed, where one looks at the sense and not the means, than the direct recollection of the x-ray of his own skull taken in other times by Meret Oppenheim, and the grotesque x-rays by Heartfield); true in their physical properties, in the quality of certified existence to the point of conventional codification.
The Carrozzerie umane, formed in viscous plastic and with deliberately mannequin-like appearance, play again with the body/image doublure with which figures such as the acrobat, the mannequin, the marionette, have already played in our century, in which a certain type of photography, tasting of body art, are nothing but the latest exponents: I am thinking, above all, of genial works such as those if Urs Lüthi, forerunners of a disguise since reduced to a caricature.

The Radiografie, on the other hand, take on a non-metaphorical notion of anatomy: they are, I like to think they are, the latest and definitive technological version Zumbo’s mortal featured waxes.

On them, however, it is necessary to add a consideration that is anything but marginal: the image — photography more real than real because it presents, not represents, and speaks of the inside, of the vital structure – is not acquired tout court by Meneghetti, with a scent, legacy of positivism and scientism, with medial mythology. It is really, a shroud: also, of work from which it proceeds to be articulated nevertheless in painting, painting of tapered and most masterful formal components, that accelerate the fantastic component, the vocation of outline to integument itself with skin (real skin let it be understood not skin/film): declaring, in mediating, exactly the threat of this loss of physicality, a further stratagem of semblance that is insinuated in the game of sense.

It is a stratagem of semblance that is hinted, but immediately withdrawn, by the resolute infusions of colour implemented by Meneghetti. We are dealing with matière couleur, on the contrary we are dealing with colour made material, despite the slender treatments, that at times seem to wash away, that take on a strong constitutive responsibility — in the timbres that resound to the point of dystonia, in the acid toning that appear to speak of taste, in a sort of allusion to cannibalism that cannot be solely visual — that found a sensorial concreteness in which tactility is not suggestion but the precise sentiment of sight, and an experience that dilates, that asks, in effect, to become, in its turn, physical.

Further temptations emerge in the latest series (Meneghetti, precisely because of his mono-thematic obsession, works in a sort of pyramid-like serialism, exploring single themes, like paragraphs of a principle reflective discourse, that is, in truth, whole and never abandoned) where, since the operating process has been stabilised, he works by means of further distillations. I seem to perceive, especially in the brief intense sequences, a return to another crucial value of our visual culture, that of the body/landscape, by no means banal neither in its outcome nor its possible developments. Well, I believe that there is more than one indication that leads us to perceive that this, among many options, is the new chapter that is opening.

However, Meneghetti is an artist who is happily non-systematic, fervid because he cannot be predicted. It is better then to wait and see.

Flaminio Gualdoni