THE SWALLOWING MASK? THE MASK SWALLOWED UP?
edit by Roberto Guiducci

If we had to speak about this photo-book by R. Meneghetti without referring to the texts, that is, the words cited therein, we would have to say that we have before us a text full of images tracing out for us a visible discourse. With our own voices silenced we should, therefore, try to search for the voice which is speaking to our eyes. Seeing that this voice is presumably original, we should try to establish exactly what voice it is talking to us. This is what truly interests us.

There is no doubt that these images are crying out for something. The fact that the author wants to give this crying out a form via the intentionality and directionality of the discursive word is a secondary matter. On the contrary one could even say in a multimedia sense that in these same objects standing before us there is the most incredible exemplification of the distance separating image from word, gesture from voice. The author’s ideology shines through these texts, through the choice and through the very way linking the chapters to each other and the words to the ‘message’ of the images reproduced. (Perhaps it shines through too clearly, but we shall discuss this later).

The author has wanted to impress his semantics on the same ideology: his manifest, conscious ‘will’. Under his ‘dialectics’ lies yet again his damned vocation for foundation which we will never grow tired of consuming. His foundation regards the Subject and Nature. It is the foundation of the lost aletheia-Truth which is constantly sought amid the waste products of a de-generated world (de-generated in the etymological sense) fallen from the height of generation: de-ject, ab-ject only to be obstinately corroded by a diabolical and apparent agent: Money, Sex, Power.

In a word we might indicate this degrading force, which is represented here on a Face, by re-utilising a slightly outmoded term. The term in question, perhaps, has more precisely been taken from its original ‘leftist’ context. We are talking about alienation.
Renato Meneghetti felt on the one hand that he was alienated and oppressed in society. On the other he felt to a certain extent that he was ‘betraying’ his fellow man in the light of his first vocation as an artist by working in the commercial fields of mass media. Consequently he had defined himself as being ‘swallowed up’.

Perhaps the fact that he would swallow up others turning them into the ‘swallowed up ones’ and himself into the ‘swallower’ should be read as a type of vindication or liberation. Meneghetti, however, is very rarely explicit in his message. It is, indeed, in the very fact that the user must free discover the ‘substance’ behind the ‘appearance’ of his paintings and his representations that his work becomes to some extent collective. It is more likely, therefore, that Meneghetti found some words that I had written behind his works.

Via operations involving turning around and upside down he placed a sinopite of words behind his paintings. In a society where everything is on show, by taking from my written works very logical and rational ‘passages’ which were often harsh and hard, Meneghetti avoided his own show of shapes and colours being accompanied by a second show of words.
By bringing certain things together Meneghetti also created, to use his own terminology, certain effects of ‘parallel convergences’ and ‘parallel divergences’.

May the reader get some blood out of his images and my words. In these merciless representations in a cruel, repugnant and blindly contradictory world, there is certainly blood to be had. May the reader also show some understanding for the innocent painter-‘executioner’ and for the essayist torn to ‘pieces’.