“THE WAYFARER’S AURA”
edit by Paolo Rizzi

The X-rays of twenty years ago have today become fashionable in aesthetic language. The artist anticipated a subject that since 1979 has spread in an explosive way throughout the world. A kind of vision is that which has become “a collective exercise on life and death”.

Critical-historical analysis

He calls it “the wayfarer’s aura”. The definition is poetic, but pertinent: it describes the phenomenon well. There is something in the air which spreads from an initial magma (I would say from a big bang): a thought, an idea, and thus also a form. Perhaps an ectoplasm. There is no need to go further into parapsychology and the doctrine of thought transference, or even reincarnation. Science has thoroughly studied the phenomenon. Human society is not made up of isolated parts: we all live in a single biosphere, we all breathe the same air, we nourish ourselves with our past, that is, of what remains (and indeed it moves about in the “aura”) of yesterday’s facts and those of centuries ago. Historians do not interpret certain coincidences in this way. It is a continuous inter-transmission, an exchange of notions and virtual stimuli. All art itself is an irradiation: the great painters and sculptors left a “mark” not only in their work but also in the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times”. They are great because they left their vital imprint. We, perhaps unconsciously, capture it; and we make it our own.
In 1979 Renato Meneghetti’s daughter, who was just four and a half years old, was injured. Her father took her to various specialists: in Geneva, in New York and in Boston. It was a family drama. Little Greta bore the torment of surgery with great patience. Her father found himself studying a series of X-rays. Those X-rays in yellow envelopes obsessed him: he did not know how to “read” them but he understood that they hid a “spoken” language that defined precisely the nature of the injury. The X-rays swamped even the table of his atelier where he worked as a painter; they became mixed with his earlier paintings, in particular the “fagocitazioni” on which he had been working for many years. An extraordinary fusion occurred. The young girl recovered. Meneghetti began to pictorially rework those X-rays: he projected them onto canvas, he meddled with them. A series of work emerged from this that continues today and that has had, with time, a resounding success. From the eye the artist quickly moved to the human body, to X-rays of a tibia, spur, or skull, of a femur, a dental arch or the ungual phalanx. The X-ray was “toned”, transformed, interpreted: it became a work in its own right, a work of art.
From that time Meneghetti, who is a careful observer of aesthetic language, began methodically studying everything relating to X-rays that was beginning to be “utilised” in the field not only of art but also of advertising graphics, design and fashion (he also looked at the philosophical background). He became aware of the fact that, before him, only certain scholars had been interested in X-rays and had developed scientific theories (for example, Hippolyte Baraduc in 1896 with his “iconography of the invisible”). The entire current of thought relating to X-rays emerged also (the Naturphilosophie, which, with Swendenborg and Kerner, postulated the existance of invisible radioactivity capable of enabling us to communicate with other worlds). In the specific field of art there was practically no precedent, excepting a certain use, indeed improper, of X-ray impressions by Robert Rauschenberg (1968). Painters had experimented with larval imprints or, like Man Ray, had reproduced photographed “halos of objects”. Nothing however, related to “pictorial” X-rays. There was a current of work on “that which is within the image” that had interested the “painters of the unconscious” (starting with Füssli and Blake, and then from Ensor to Munch) but with very different aims. Meneghetti, in brief, was the initiator of a new way of painting using the X-ray.
This was the first discovery. Then there was another, even more sensational. From that 1979, and above all throughout these last few years, there has been a multiplication in the use of the X-ray in both so-called pure painting and advertising images. With the meticulousness of a scientific researcher, Meneghetti dated a very long list of the aesthetic “applications” of X-rays. There are hundreds and hundreds of cases. Why is it that before 1979 there were none, and yet from that year there has been a genuine “proliferation”? Anyone who has examined each case one by one has been shocked. It seems (let us say prudently: it seems) that Meneghetti was the “prototype”, the man who began the long series of variations on a theme.
A comprehensive dossier confirms this. Artists and graphic designers have indulged themselves in the use of human X-rays with surprising coincidence. In some cases one could speak of real plagiarism. Meneghetti does not want to force the issue too much. But it is for this very reason that he speaks of “the wayfarer’s aura”. He feels – and the documents confirm this to him – an innovator, an anticipator of taste: the person who “set the ball rolling” for a fashion that spread rapidly above all in magazines, posters, record covers, and advertising in general, in addition to true painting.
Let us be frank: there is nothing “miraculous” about this. History tells us (let us limit ourselves to the field of painting) of artists who anticipated taste and became authentic leaders of a movement. Giorgione, for example, lived for a brief time, but in this short span (practically the first ten years of the sixteenth century) he probed into subsequent painting in a certain sense. Giorgionism became a fashion for centuries. The same can be verified (the comparison does not shock) in relation to Caravaggio: when he arrived in Rome around 1592, he irradiated an “aura” which spread throughout Europe over a few years. The artist, remaining in the south between Malta and Naples, was probably not even aware of this.
What is curious is that sometimes it is not the work that spreads but the means, the specific linguistic declination, the aesthetic language, the “style”. Perhaps Lorenzo Bernini did not invent the Baroque, but he was certainly the spark that set things in motion. There are examples closer to our time. Many painters have represented “the scream”, but the person who painted “the scream” was Edvard Munch and from him spread the entire visualisation of what is a sound, a noise, that is, something that theoretically cannot be represented. Even more banal: did Picasso know when he created a bull’s horns from bicycle handles that a kind of relationship would form in people’s imagination of a psychological relationship between these two elements that are so different from one another? These precursors have always existed: in substance they were the first to sense what was to come. This comes from having a particular sensitivity, an ability to foresee. The work of fashion designers is all about this. Thus there is no reason to be surprised that Meneghetti, with his X-rays, was the one to open the way which a few years later many “creative people” (and not creators) would take.
Rather, the question that should be asked is: why has the fashion for X-rays established itself in these last few years? More than a century has passed (1895) since the German physicist Röntgen fortuitously discovered that invisible irradiance imprinted the photographic plate and offered in transparency the first images of the living human body. How many millions of people from then have been in front of an X-ray machine? Aside from the possibility (medical) of “reading” the plate, there is something curious, almost morbid, about being in front of such a machine. It seems almost as though we can “see beyond”, enter within the human organism to discover the soul (ànemos: life giving breath): so that the X-ray in fact becomes a “journey in the search for man” (Freud). But who, before a few years ago, had set themselves the task of aesthetically “giving life” to X-ray images?
Meneghetti was the first. The credit (so to speak) perhaps goes to his daughter’s injured eye and consequently, to the invasion of X-ray images on the painter’s table. The point is that it happened: and it happened in a way that did not in the past. From that time the fashion spread. It is as though humankind became aware above all of the communicative, and then aesthetic and artistic, qualities of the X-ray. That larval glow, that flowering in negative of bone structures, the entering under the skin, within the flesh, between the veins, in the muscles; above all that sense of amazing mystery, almost of taboo, of venturing within another human being and perhaps finding yourself in a tunnel half way between life and death, indeed, very close to death …. Anatomical research through light, perception, almost the mysterious pulsation of an organism: moving close, almost lewdly, to the origin of the species, to the first cosmogenic nucleus.
All of this has recently become a collective curiosity: and slowly the instruments of communication have adopted it in order to evoke in us strange, unique and new sensations. Advertising has seeped under the transparent epithelium that covers us; and it has disclosed psychic connections, sensations, unconscious desires, funereal or erotic thrills, the hidden breath of things. The membrane has let pass the gaze of many voyeurs. Certainly, the important media became aware of this and have rubbed salt in the wound. X rays, more or less explicit, have appeared on posters, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the range of advertising that surrounds us; naturally they have appeared on the screen and invaded computers.
As earlier mentioned, Meneghetti has collected a vast range of examples; it is quite astonishing because the examples have multiplied in the space of very few years: above all in the last three or four years. The first pictorial X-rays by Meneghetti are dated from 1979: and already in 1981 they took on their unmistakable appearance with the colour tones and splendid “psychic deformations” (let us call them this) from which they take shape. Meneghetti smiles when we remind him of all the sources (and let’s be clear: only in part direct) which have emerged from his work. He says: “I am still surprised when I leaf through magazines, switch on the television, go to the cinema, and walk through the streets. My X-rays, twenty years on, have returned as a tool for the mass media”.
Meneghetti’s surprise is more than justified in that it is confirmed by incontrovertible facts. One need only cite some examples: Kellog’s use the X-ray of the pelvis to state that its product is good for bones (1997). Kelly Hansen, producer of technical clothing, presents an X-ray of a hand in advertising (1997). Yet more: the hand which offers the Findus fish finger is an X-ray (1998); Energie sports clothing (1998) has a tibia or the front of a skull to illustrate that its products are safe. The examples continue: they concern commercial firms and also genuine artists. An actor such as Steve Miller won an international competition for the World Cup Soccer by using the X-ray of a foot with a soccer ball. Today there are many artists using X-rays: Katharina Sieverding, Daniele Galliano, David Stuart, Peter Dazely, Richard Stock, Nick Vaccaro, Dorothy Young Riess, David Job, Robert Gligorov, Thomas Hager, and so on.
In certain cases – and it is important to point this out – there is no coincidence: they are what Meneghetti calls, albeit ironically, “misappropriation”. An example is that of John Richmond in 1998. On two occasions, the invitations to the opening of his collections in Milan were X-rays in a hospital radiography envelope; “the same that Meneghetti had sent some months earlier as invitations to his personal show at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano”. Here one is really dealing with “irradiation”. But did not Picasso also find a whole series of imitators following his invention of Cubism in 1907/8?
An invention or a discovery, when they derive from an individual’s general make-up, almost immediately become part of humanity’s cultural heritage. Meneghetti in a certain sense is also pleased about the imitations and even proud of the plagiarism, but above he knows that he opened – one does not know how or why – a way. He notes: “All this surprises me but also terrifies me because, in this game of chance over life and death that has become collective, suffering becomes a type of foresight; ideas, like the old pictorial phagocytes, are wayfarers: a kind of aura takes the path of space and arrives: arrives I don’t know where…”.
At this point a conviction appears and becomes objective: Meneghetti is effectively (who could deny this) the leader of a movement, perhaps unknowingly. The day he found himself alone reflecting on the X-rays of his daughter’s eye became “something that moves in the world”. I could add a phrase from Nietzsche: “Artists are not travellers, they do not buy a return ticket. They are wayfarers. They leave for unknown lands.”
Meneghetti left more than twenty years ago. Like all artists his destination was “unknown”. But the “wayfarer” has already left an indelible mark. Indeed: an aura.

Paolo Rizzi

 

CRITICAL HISTORICAL ANALISYS
edit by Paolo Rizzi

The X-rays of twenty years ago have today become fashionable in aesthetic language. The artist anticipated a subject that since 1979 has spread in an explosive way throughout the world. A kind of vision is that which has become “a collective exercise on life and death”.He calls it “the wayfarer’s aura”. The definition is poetic, but pertinent: it describes the phenomenon well. There is something in the air which spreads from an initial magma (I would say from a big bang): a thought, an idea, and thus also a form. Perhaps an ectoplasm. There is no need to go further into parapsychology and the doctrine of thought transference, or even reincarnation. Science has thoroughly studied the phenomenon. Human society is not made up of isolated parts: we all live in a single biosphere, we all breathe the same air, we nourish ourselves with our past, that is, of what remains (and indeed it moves about in the “aura”) of yesterday’s facts and those of centuries ago. Historians do not interpret certain coincidences in this way. It is a continuous inter-transmission, an exchange of notions and virtual stimuli. All art itself is an irradiation: the great painters and sculptors left a “mark” not only in their work but also in the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times”. They are great because they left their vital imprint. We, perhaps unconsciously, capture it; and we make it our own.

In 1979 Renato Meneghetti’s daughter, who was just four and a half years old, was injured. Her father took her to various specialists: in Geneva, in New York and in Boston. It was a family drama. Little Greta bore the torment of surgery with great patience. Her father found himself studying a series of X-rays. Those X-rays in yellow envelopes obsessed him: he did not know how to “read” them but he understood that they hid a “spoken” language that defined precisely the nature of the injury. The X-rays swamped even the table of his atelier where he worked as a painter; they became mixed with his earlier paintings, in particular the “fagocitazioni” on which he had been working for many years. An extraordinary fusion occurred. The young girl recovered. Meneghetti began to pictorially rework those X-rays: he projected them onto canvas, he meddled with them. A series of work emerged from this that continues today and that has had, with time, a resounding success. From the eye the artist quickly moved to the human body, to X-rays of a tibia, spur, or skull, of a femur, a dental arch or the ungual phalanx. The X-ray was “toned”, transformed, interpreted: it became a work in its own right, a work of art.

From that time Meneghetti, who is a careful observer of aesthetic language, began methodically studying everything relating to X-rays that was beginning to be “utilised” in the field not only of art but also of advertising graphics, design and fashion (he also looked at the philosophical background). He became aware of the fact that, before him, only certain scholars had been interested in X-rays and had developed scientific theories (for example, Hippolyte Baraduc in 1896 with his “iconography of the invisible”). The entire current of thought relating to X-rays emerged also (the Naturphilosophie, which, with Swendenborg and Kerner, postulated the existance of invisible radioactivity capable of enabling us to communicate with other worlds). In the specific field of art there was practically no precedent, excepting a certain use, indeed improper, of X-ray impressions by Robert Rauschenberg (1968). Painters had experimented with larval imprints or, like Man Ray, had reproduced photographed “halos of objects”. Nothing however, related to “pictorial” X-rays. There was a current of work on “that which is within the image” that had interested the “painters of the unconscious” (starting with Füssli and Blake, and then from Ensor to Munch) but with very different aims. Meneghetti, in brief, was the initiator of a new way of painting using the X-ray.

This was the first discovery. Then there was another, even more sensational. From that 1979, and above all throughout these last few years, there has been a multiplication in the use of the X-ray in both so-called pure painting and advertising images. With the meticulousness of a scientific researcher, Meneghetti dated a very long list of the aesthetic “applications” of X-rays. There are hundreds and hundreds of cases. Why is it that before 1979 there were none, and yet from that year there has been a genuine “proliferation”? Anyone who has examined each case one by one has been shocked. It seems (let us say prudently: it seems) that Meneghetti was the “prototype”, the man who began the long series of variations on a theme.
A comprehensive dossier confirms this. Artists and graphic designers have indulged themselves in the use of human X-rays with surprising coincidence. In some cases one could speak of real plagiarism. Meneghetti does not want to force the issue too much. But it is for this very reason that he speaks of “the wayfarer’s aura”. He feels – and the documents confirm this to him – an innovator, an anticipator of taste: the person who “set the ball rolling” for a fashion that spread rapidly above all in magazines, posters, record covers, and advertising in general, in addition to true painting.

Let us be frank: there is nothing “miraculous” about this. History tells us (let us limit ourselves to the field of painting) of artists who anticipated taste and became authentic leaders of a movement. Giorgione, for example, lived for a brief time, but in this short span (practically the first ten years of the sixteenth century) he probed into subsequent painting in a certain sense. Giorgionism became a fashion for centuries. The same can be verified (the comparison does not shock) in relation to Caravaggio: when he arrived in Rome around 1592, he irradiated an “aura” which spread throughout Europe over a few years. The artist, remaining in the south between Malta and Naples, was probably not even aware of this.
What is curious is that sometimes it is not the work that spreads but the means, the specific linguistic declination, the aesthetic language, the “style”. Perhaps Lorenzo Bernini did not invent the Baroque, but he was certainly the spark that set things in motion. There are examples closer to our time. Many painters have represented “the scream”, but the person who painted “the scream” was Edvard Munch and from him spread the entire visualisation of what is a sound, a noise, that is, something that theoretically cannot be represented. Even more banal: did Picasso know when he created a bull’s horns from bicycle handles that a kind of relationship would form in people’s imagination of a psychological relationship between these two elements that are so different from one another? These precursors have always existed: in substance they were the first to sense what was to come. This comes from having a particular sensitivity, an ability to foresee. The work of fashion designers is all about this. Thus there is no reason to be surprised that Meneghetti, with his X-rays, was the one to open the way which a few years later many “creative people” (and not creators) would take.

Rather, the question that should be asked is: why has the fashion for X-rays established itself in these last few years? More than a century has passed (1895) since the German physicist Röntgen fortuitously discovered that invisible irradiance imprinted the photographic plate and offered in transparency the first images of the living human body. How many millions of people from then have been in front of an X-ray machine? Aside from the possibility (medical) of “reading” the plate, there is something curious, almost morbid, about being in front of such a machine. It seems almost as though we can “see beyond”, enter within the human organism to discover the soul (ànemos: life giving breath): so that the X-ray in fact becomes a “journey in the search for man” (Freud). But who, before a few years ago, had set themselves the task of aesthetically “giving life” to X-ray images?
Meneghetti was the first. The credit (so to speak) perhaps goes to his daughter’s injured eye and consequently, to the invasion of X-ray images on the painter’s table. The point is that it happened: and it happened in a way that did not in the past. From that time the fashion spread. It is as though humankind became aware above all of the communicative, and then aesthetic and artistic, qualities of the X-ray. That larval glow, that flowering in negative of bone structures, the entering under the skin, within the flesh, between the veins, in the muscles; above all that sense of amazing mystery, almost of taboo, of venturing within another human being and perhaps finding yourself in a tunnel half way between life and death, indeed, very close to death …. Anatomical research through light, perception, almost the mysterious pulsation of an organism: moving close, almost lewdly, to the origin of the species, to the first cosmogenic nucleus.

All of this has recently become a collective curiosity: and slowly the instruments of communication have adopted it in order to evoke in us strange, unique and new sensations. Advertising has seeped under the transparent epithelium that covers us; and it has disclosed psychic connections, sensations, unconscious desires, funereal or erotic thrills, the hidden breath of things. The membrane has let pass the gaze of many voyeurs. Certainly, the important media became aware of this and have rubbed salt in the wound. X rays, more or less explicit, have appeared on posters, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the range of advertising that surrounds us; naturally they have appeared on the screen and invaded computers.
As earlier mentioned, Meneghetti has collected a vast range of examples; it is quite astonishing because the examples have multiplied in the space of very few years: above all in the last three or four years. The first pictorial X-rays by Meneghetti are dated from 1979: and already in 1981 they took on their unmistakable appearance with the colour tones and splendid “psychic deformations” (let us call them this) from which they take shape. Meneghetti smiles when we remind him of all the sources (and let’s be clear: only in part direct) which have emerged from his work. He says: “I am still surprised when I leaf through magazines, switch on the television, go to the cinema, and walk through the streets. My X-rays, twenty years on, have returned as a tool for the mass media”.
Meneghetti’s surprise is more than justified in that it is confirmed by incontrovertible facts. One need only cite some examples: Kellog’s use the X-ray of the pelvis to state that its product is good for bones (1997). Kelly Hansen, producer of technical clothing, presents an X-ray of a hand in advertising (1997). Yet more: the hand which offers the Findus fish finger is an X-ray (1998); Energie sports clothing (1998) has a tibia or the front of a skull to illustrate that its products are safe. The examples continue: they concern commercial firms and also genuine artists. An actor such as Steve Miller won an international competition for the World Cup Soccer by using the X-ray of a foot with a soccer ball. Today there are many artists using X-rays: Katharina Sieverding, Daniele Galliano, David Stuart, Peter Dazely, Richard Stock, Nick Vaccaro, Dorothy Young Riess, David Job, Robert Gligorov, Thomas Hager, and so on.
In certain cases – and it is important to point this out – there is no coincidence: they are what Meneghetti calls, albeit ironically, “misappropriation”. An example is that of John Richmond in 1998. On two occasions, the invitations to the opening of his collections in Milan were X-rays in a hospital radiography envelope; “the same that Meneghetti had sent some months earlier as invitations to his personal show at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano”. Here one is really dealing with “irradiation”. But did not Picasso also find a whole series of imitators following his invention of Cubism in 1907/8?

An invention or a discovery, when they derive from an individual’s general make-up, almost immediately become part of humanity’s cultural heritage. Meneghetti in a certain sense is also pleased about the imitations and even proud of the plagiarism, but above he knows that he opened – one does not know how or why – a way. He notes: “All this surprises me but also terrifies me because, in this game of chance over life and death that has become collective, suffering becomes a type of foresight; ideas, like the old pictorial phagocytes, are wayfarers: a kind of aura takes the path of space and arrives: arrives I don’t know where…”.
At this point a conviction appears and becomes objective: Meneghetti is effectively (who could deny this) the leader of a movement, perhaps unknowingly. The day he found himself alone reflecting on the X-rays of his daughter’s eye became “something that moves in the world”. I could add a phrase from Nietzsche: “Artists are not travellers, they do not buy a return ticket. They are wayfarers. They leave for unknown lands.”
Meneghetti left more than twenty years ago. Like all artists his destination was “unknown”. But the “wayfarer” has already left an indelible mark. Indeed: an aura.

Paolo Rizzi