GLORIOUS: ELEMENTS AND DISCIPLINE OF VIOLENCE
edit by Gregory J. Markopoulos

From the moment of his birth (in Rosà di Vicenza) and abruptly (though perhaps not so abruptly in the sense of Creation) he began to paint. He began self taught. How this happened, no one knows, and no one will ever know. One can only guess that it might have been caused by the purity of the mountain air.

Nevertheless, the collage of time, of the late-sixties, led to encounters with Carlo Munari and Lucio Fontana. By then Meneghetti had already making his own effort (for one or two years after having entered the art academy) and, as he himself says, of having barricaded himself in an attic and painted for a period in a style he likes to call «di getto» painting. I don't know what general principles he knew at that time or what he acquired af terwards as his encounters with painters and other individuals multiplied. Perhaps remaining ignorant of certain principles brought him to create certain desires for himself, desires he courageously put into practice. Whatever he did, he made his own rules. There is absolutely no doubt about it. The instant of his desire to create can come from his desire to destroy a work only to begin again in the same space or on the same surface to affirm once more what has been lost. The real temptation is to know, to realize that nothing is ever lost.

(...) Even though everything in a human sense is lost in the destruction of anything that exists before the moment of destruction, the real moment of destruction is the instant that does not permit further destruction: he returns to create. Just think of the twisting necks of two swans. This spectacular action, this act of destruction, becomes the artist's personal policy in its strictest sense.
Variable actions, variable winds that bring out imperfect, wonderful possibilities. The sun, the stars, the planets contain divine forces and are the most divine. Man is of the finite generation. All of the graces are in relation to the sky, and this is why the best search for Good and Evil. This is assimilated, eternally, in everywork.

What does a self-taught painter who wants to free himself from false myths and begin again with an art that becomes his particular Desire do? The possibilities include painting (Hyper-subjectivism: painting on photography), photography (Multiprojections on a three-dimensional human screen), sculpture (Human bodywark: thermo-farmed plastic), music (Computer and instrument), and Fnally, the inevitable cinema (Constructing in moviola).
One can sense wonder and dismay upon realizing that these contain elements of the discipline of violence. For me, nothing else remains of the use of cinematographic film and its components as a new means for other arts (painting, photography, sculpture, music, theater) than the dismembered parts of an improbable, disjointed creation. They become Euripides' tragedy, Bacchae. The dismembering of Diogenes. Or much earlier, the pretence of Osiris across the space that is the planet Earth.

It is the opposition between Cézanne (who was violent by nature) and Eugène Berman. The superb capacities of Cézanne's stones with the allusions Berman's Temptation of St Anthony, thereby permitting readers of this text to understand what I am trying to transmit. The exultant fullness, the real ecstasy of Cézanne's work can never be reached by the derived cinematographic persistence of a Berman. We have to understand that perfect goodness is crowned like an element of violence. The painter, like a doctor, recognizes the situation's anatomy and landscape. The landscape is near Bassano del Grappa. There is a spectacular view from Villa Drigo, far from the mountains. The long avenues of trees complement the great castle and its spacious rooms, many of which are used for the discipline that is Renato Meneghetti's work: the room with his artistic work in chronological order; the tower above, where the work is classified, approximately 500 paintings. The various paintings are the artist's real soul, the complete structure of the interior of his great Desire for work. In the tower below one f nds the machine on which the work's anatomy has been been dissected and destroved hundreds of times. Here, the creative moment is revealed, and here the Divergenze parallele began to be compiled; it happened magically when, for the first time, at age ten, the Desire to paint appeared.

Fortunately for Meneghetti, he desires his Desire in a manner that is his most serious, once again, making it such that he desires to create with visual senses and impressions. Doesn't a painter do the same thing when he paints, the moment when the brush of the color touches the canvas, or, in other cases, strikes the canvas? The moral of placing or striking the canvas is a different question; perhaps an element, perhaps a discipline of violence. Making his declaration the artist reaches an instant of Beatitude. Like a child, the artist knows the elements of violence instinctively and begins to create. The beginning was the discipline inherent to the violence. Incapable of acting towards good or evil, the child is left with destiny's gift. The artist capable of acting mutilates himsel f repeatedly, in his successful attempt with what has become the Violence. The opposite becomes Glorious.

Gregory J. Markopoulos