ORDER AND DURATION
edit by Carlo Munari

I have had the opportunity to appreciate Renato Meneghetti’s experiences. In them you can note a participation in the vital themes of the art of our times.
Thus, I am happy to present him to the public of Bassano, a city that remains dear to me from a time that now goes back to the early-Fifties, when I came here from Padua with other artists and, perhaps, other convictions.
Our era, however, only allows for private nostalgias because artistic languages change very rapidly. It would be a grave error to refuse current experimentation remaining bound to what, in the past, we held to be of value…
Certainly a solution becomes necessary, today as yesterday, especially with the aim of identifying the authenticity of a presence and the legitimacy of a message.

So let me say that, in Meneghetti, authenticity and legitimacy appear certain to me, conquests from hypothesizing in the future.
In any event, by now, it is possible to point out a consciousness of individual destiny. Meneghetti has recognized the undelayable need to state the events and the mythologies of our uneasy years in a context of a pluralistic representation of reality. He has clear percepitions of the evocative possibilities of extrapictorial materials (when they are chosen and juxtaposed in a certain structural way, to the point of possing their physical nature and, with it, the inertia and the cowardice of ‘product’ or of refuse) to be transformed into a vehicle of communication.

In short Meneghetti tends to establish a direct relationship with the world, with the aim of gathering even its most clamorous aspects, to denounce them in the moment itself of objective representation. He aspires toward reinstating an order, a new durée, in relation to our technological civilization.
In the end, one experience completes the other because, in the dialectic of the human things, the contingent, the existential, places itself as a prologue in a metamorphose that has its conclusion, in fact, in order, duration.

This is known in the artist’s intentions: intentions that are legible in the works, that I hope will be able to expand its very dimension in the future to a point that it is profoundly impressed on the user. What counts, however, is the accuracy of formulation Meneghetti reveals: we are not dealing with a signing a bank draft but, more simply, of soliciting attention towards a young man who reveals a precise intelligence of his time, living it and suffering it fully, without reserve.

Carlo Munari