Is it possible to translate the body into colour? It is possible, for example, in the painting of Renato Meneghetti. It seems to me that this is, indeed, the most singular center of his policentric endeavour, an endeavour which began with figurative representation, but which then has travelled, amphibion-like, for the last few decades, between architecture, design, performances, conceptual experimentation. And, of course, painting.
The body as color, then. In Meneghetti’s Radiografie, realistic detail, indeed, ultrarealistic (what is more faithful to the truth than an X-ray?) becomes the point of departure for a visionary declination of forms, for a voyage within and beyond the body. Anatomical form, in short, becomes shadow, halo, the ghostly. It becomes an alarmed landscape, somewhere between dream and nightmare, a background, almost, of oneiric dawns and mental sunsets.
It is just this glance of Meneghetti which reveals itself as confusive, (not confused, which is a different thing altogether) exactly in the way that the glance of little Hans, about whom Freud speaks, was confusive.
The bobbin with which the little boy played could become, at times, his father, his mother, at times, the little boy himself. And something similar happens in Meneghetti’s paintings. His limb-ghosts, which are indicated in the sub-titles with laconic precision (cranium, mandible, head, forearm, spinal column) give rise to unexpected forms which can be, from one painting to the next, almost anything. One can seem to intuit a cane thicket, to catch a glimpse of a grasshopper, to meet up with strange, still, ant-like insects. A subtle sense of dizziness sizes hold of us when we try to define the distance which separates being and appearing.
But let’s get back to color. We are used to thinking of classical statuary in the shining light of marble or the sombre light of bronze. On the contrary, archaeology has shown us that, just as Greek temples were colourful, so too the sculptures had eyes, lips, hair rendered by the insertion of various materials and by subtle chromatic effects. Glazes and pigments further enriched the chromatic dimension. A similar inversion of perspective is required of us when we look at the works of a painter who is absolutely distant from classicism, as is, indeed, Meneghetti. Bones are no longer grey, the various parts of the body no longer have a predictable chromatic character. Everything transforms itself, everything falls prey to an inexplicable metamorphosis.
One must not think of these, however, as purely aesthetic effects. On the contrary, it seems to me that precisely these phantasmagoric forms with their evaporating tones, these kaleidoscopes of phosphorent colour-changes, underline, rather than beauty, the precariousness and the inadequacy of the body and, therefore, of existence.
Meneghetti does not use color because of its beauty. He uses color because color, like every form of light, is connected to a time which is momentary, provisional. It changes, it lights up, it fades.
And so the Dantesque voyage into the body reveals its diseases, its larval condition, its skeletal, two-dimensional, and cartilaginous nature. Its volume is reduced to a surface, a diaphanous surface, which seems about to break, to tear.
On the other hand, and this is part of what’s so innovative in Meneghetti’s painting, this so-called scientific statement of human fragility, this philosophical lucidity which comes from empirical observation, doesn’t give rise to a theatre of anguish, nor to reflections which are bitter and pessimistic.
On the contrary, we are witnesses to a vein which is not ironic, but vitalizing, almost as if these biceps and archaeological finds (for one can consider Meneghetti’s painting an archaeology of the body) are a catalyst for a renewed amor vitae.
A strange euphoria runs through these paintings. Yes, because the muse who presides over these works is not Melancholy, but rather the Sybil. Meneghetti is interested in suggesting the dimension of enigma which can be found in everything. And this vision, as if through a lens, this close-up encounter with the body translates itself into a question which has no answer.
The body as a mystery then. Exactly that which is most familiar to us, that which we most definitively are, is that in all of existence which we know least. And it is precisely this which is one of the lessons Meneghetti’s work offers us, a lesson about which there is always a great deal to think.
On the other hand, another strong point in the work of the artist is his many-sidedness, his faceting, which I referred to briefly at the beginning. Meneghetti has tried his hand at a multiplicity of languages, without favouring any one of them in particular, or, better, loving them all indiscrimately, as if they were his sons and daughters, each with its own physiognomy. I read these notes from the artist’s curriculum vitae: “Painting 1954 -1998; Sculpture 1963 -1998; Photography 1980 -1981; Music 1980 -1983; Design 1970 -1976; Architecture 1972 -1985; Performances 1980 -1997; Installations 1979 -1999; Theatre 1983 -1985.”
It is a meticulous list, attentive to xylology. Which reveals above all one thing: the need to use different ways of saying, precisely because what is important is not so much the technique of expression, the skill of a craft mastered and exhibited in a single language. What is important is to say all that one has discovered, all one has intuited, all that wishes to be said. Looking more closely we see that painting itself becomes performance, photography becomes painting, architecture becomes theatre. The body (painted, or X-rayed) is the protagonist of a mystery play, of a solo or a monologue without words, in which the script is mute, but not for this reason any less eloquent.
I read from one of the artist’s declarations: ‘I have also gotten beyond the individual mystification of the frame; I have left behind me technical interventions on the X-ray film itself or in direct relation to it, so as to obtain an aesthetic result both conceived of and desired, so as to create quite other sorts of mysteries […]’
And so, if it is possible to comment upon these words, already so clear in and of themselves, we could say that craft itself, understood as mystification, does not interest the artist. What interests him is rather the exploration of a territory: the territory of hallucination, of dream, of the subconscious, of subtext, of the repressed.
These territories can be attacked from many points of view and by means of different languages. What’s necessary is that the language be as authentic as possible, and that it does not get lost in technicalities, in virtuosities, in gratifications for their own sake. Also because we witness in these works a sort of reductio ad unum of the various grammars, the different rules of syntax. On the one hand, one can see Meneghetti’s paintings as living works, the result of a performance and also its warehouse.
On the other hand, it is the very action of the body itself which becomes painting. Everything converges, and yet everything remains.
What doesn’t ‘remain’ is, perhaps, the physiognomy of a man, our physiognomy, as it is reflected in this work. It’s a physiognomy which is anything but aulic, noble, heroic. However seductive the colors may be, the body, in its entirety, appears on the other side of any mask. And yet…
Nietzsche’s words come to mind here: ‘All that which is human is not worth taking very seriously, but…’ There we have it, the work of Meneghetti accounts both for that ‘not’ and that ‘but’.

Elena Pontiggia