RENATO MENEGHETTI AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATION
edit by Pierre Restany

Renato Meneghetti is, before anything else, a man of his time. He was able to feel the imminence of the change in our perceptive consciousness and the emergence of the global communication dimension. He confronted this expanding field of communication firstly as a painter, with his monotypes, collages, decoupage and the material effects he achieved that were dear to the Informal movement. In the 1970s, due to the artist’s encounter with both Munari and Fontanaavvia, his work became permanently connected with the evolving future of the image. The fate of the image became his own fate.

At a time when the globalisation of computer information structures was taking its first steps forward, Meneghetti understood that, at the threshold of the third millennium, the future of the image no longer depended on loyalty to tradition or to the status of the image as a single work. Meneghetti thus became the man-orchestra of communication on the road to globalisation: he dedicated himself to those first concurrent experiments with photography, music, sculpture, design and architecture.

This led to his first multimedia works, the most famous of which are Albero tecnologico, Tavolo dei giochi, the Insania project, the Divergenze parallele film, and the “Luigi Bonfanti” automobile museum. From 1979-80 the artist’s first performance installations were born, under the symbol of “fagocitazione” (“phagocytation”), overcoming the concept of the single image. Concurrently with the creation of these multimedia works, Meneghetti began, from the early 1980s, a unique iconographic procedure, his Radiografie, which involved transferring medical X-rays onto canvas through the application of a layer of alcohol-based fixative. X-rays of the brain, spinal column, tibia and other parts of the human body, which are those of the artist himself or other people, became self-portraits, or portraits of his mother or intimate friends.

A new perceptive reality was born from the introspective power of X-rays that highlighted a second identity of our being through the unveiled image of our skeleton, a second identity that lends itself to an unlimited array of unexpected analogies. The recent series of ceramic Palme is the result of an observation made by Meneghetti on the occasion of a trip to Santo Domingo: the formal analogy of the trunks of Caribbean palm trees with parts of human skeleton.

I remember the Informal art scene’s excitement at the end of the 1950s in the wake of discoveries made by certain biologists who were utilising the most advanced techniques of the time, in particular the electronic microscope. Enlarged a million times, fragments of neurones looked unmistakably like Mathieu images, shards of volcanic rock were like Sam Francis images, and filled with redundancies, the Fautrier nudes evoked uterine walls. I remember that in that period I wrote an article on this profound global reality which lay beyond the visual capacities of the naked eye. This precursor to the recognition of a global territory of advanced vision remained undeveloped in those years. Then, in 1997, forty years after the discovery of the electronic microscope, Meneghetti resumed the ‘journey beyond the eye’ by publicly exhibiting all his X-rays from the 1980s and 1990s at the Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano, which inaugurated a series of subsequent shows.
The Radiografie are at the centre of the main existential preoccupations that are the prerogative of our global culture. The effect of the globalisation of computer information technologies will be the real grafting of the electronic machine onto the brains of future generations. Internet will become the individual and collective memory of humanity. Why continue to memorise basic and essential facts that even today determine our culture and sensibility? Stored in Internet these facts are available immediately and at any time. What will we do then, with the mental energy that is liberated as a consequence? We can be hopeful. It is my innermost conviction that the energy will be transformed into sensitive energy able to enrich and stimulate the global exercise of ours senses, beginning with sight and hearing, and moving on to taste, smell and touch. In this way we will have an organic global approach towards the world and an aura of communication that is more synthetically sensorial.

The Meneghetti Radiografie respond to this increase in sensorial activity at the heart of our perceptive activities. One needs to consider the “beyond the eye” alongside another current symptomatic phenomenon: the progressive conceptual objectivisation of our body. This is far from the debut of Body Art! The functional strategy of an artist like Orlan is significant: we are living in the realm of the mutant body. The body, seat of our vital inspiration and our identity, has become the main stage for our existential scenes. The X-ray image of our body proposed by Meneghetti is inseparable from the first lines of a novel, which take into consideration the perceptive globality of our new way of seeing. This is why the explorer of the “beyond routine” adds the journalist’s pen to the multiple strings of his bow. His use of multi-media refers us to the order of future perception. Bombarded by a multitude of simultaneous computer messages, the human of a global culture will make a selection. And this auto-selective power in the end will coincide with the measure of our sensitivity and humanistic culture.

Renato Meneghetti is a man of his era: he lives the right rhythm to our developing perceptive consciousness. In the chaos of our era, this type of man is as rare as a well-tempered harpsichord in a “techno” concert, and “techno”, moreover, is something Meneghetti likes: I am happy that I share this with him.

Pierre Restany