"POST-HUMANS"
edit by Maria Luisa Lolli

The Eighties was the decade of the body, a body that was de-humanised, forced, torn from nature. The Post-human period disembarked in Italy with a very well known exhibition at Rivoli, and newly celebrated this very year at pac with Rosso Vivo, claims a new aesthetic, enemy of the sought-after harmony of Humanism and thereafter. Reality now appears as a clash of passions and the representation of the world cannot be detached from the principal of chaos and violence. The representation of kitsch, and even of the horrendous, becomes necessary for the truth in an art which appears as a form of realism and consciously refutes utopia. He seems to say ‘if the world has to be changed, it will be changed because we have shown it to be revolting’. Meneghetti has also composed a series of works under the title of Post-umani, seven acrylic paints on a sheet where profiles can be seen in deliberately ridiculous or theatrical poses, sometimes contracted into painful grimaces, sometimes simply vulgar. With the cycle of the Fagocitazioni, the artist had already shown how painting could mirror the harshness of the world, and could be the place where we become aware of this severity. And the Post-umani seem to have accepted this lesson and clarified it, putting it to good use with the modelling conquests of the first Radiografie and livening it up with an evidently ironic tone, in the style of Pop Art revived. It is not by chance that the Post-umani are accompanied by another series, very similar shape-wise to that of Parrucconi.

Maria Luisa Lolli