THE TRACES OF A POEM OF PROFUNDITY
edit by Giorgio Seveso

Leafing through the now vast body of writing on Meneghetti can cause vertigo, the true elite of art criticism today has dealt at some time or other with his work, the list is made up of famous names and renowned international scholars. Yet this volcanic, many-sided artist from Vicenza, being secluded, is still almost unknown to the public at large, taking a back seat when compared to the more insistently ubiquitous determination that often characterises the manner of many of his colleagues. Indeed only on a few, carefully considered occasions is his work methodically presented. But, on these occasions, his work is given in well thought-out exhibitions in prestigious not “fashionable” settings, chosen within the confines of an important theme, a well-rounded subject that Meneghetti has majestically treated through the years with combinations and explorations of the most varied linguistic and technical expression. Or, as if they were intriguing, mysterious messages in a bottle, from time to time, over the years, he has posted a book, a disk or videotape to the critics and a selected group of contemporary art dealers and connoisseurs.
The well-known strangeness of our present-day «art system», which often promotes certain repetitive talents to the point of nausea while refusing to do justice to those who have something really original to say, strikes yet again in the case of Meneghetti.

Faced with this, a fact comes to mind: that by being somewhat secluded and out of the normal bustle of things, in the world of contemporary art there is a world that is something of its own, a special world. It consists of that sector that is made of attention, sensitivity, expressive investigation that has not, shall we say, given up the more serious reasons behind the image which are rooted in a research that is neither a means in itself or governed by pure market logic, and therefore transfers the image itself and its lot to the field of ethics rather than pure aesthetics. A world in which the creative gesture (be it, as in Meneghetti’s case, painting, sculpture, installation or above all transfiguration of the very idea of the x-ray) is the true distillation of style, the constant exercise of the mind and the heart, the result of an extraordinary concentration of every emotional and rational resource.

It is exactly this exciting, excited concentration, precisely this uncomfortable, impalpable seduction that, in his elaboration of x-ray plates, slowly and gently penetrates the observer’s attention, catching his thoughts off guard, undermining the laziness in his eye, frosting immobile contemplation into taking a standpoint on the ambiguity of sight, troubled by the arcane combining of images, fascinated by the supple hieratic character of the forms and that transparency that questions them. Large or small canvasses, emulsified or pigmented, paper, banners of transparency and uneasiness, made even more disturbing by the enigma of upsetting titles that recall domestic affections, these x-rays on first impact could remind one of a German artist with the English pseudonym: John Heartfield, photomontages and x-rays from the 30s and 40s, in protest against the nazi regime and wartime violence. There is no doubt that there is something of Heartfield in his work just as there is something of Brecht in the method used by both artists.

That is to say: a widespread sense of tragedy, of irony and the grotesque, combined with a sense for alienation, cold conceptual detachment. This against the backdrop of a distant sense of humour that dismembers and recomposes reality restoring its most intimate meaning, its rawest truth that goes beyond the comfortable exterior, under the skin and body of things: a rational, energetic, desecrating fantasy stripping the myths of appearance and uncovering their contradictions, their deafness and their dullness. But opposite the alarming, energetic psychological impact created by the emotional effect of his images lies the parallel echo of another allusion. We are also brought to think of Rorschach’s ink-blotches: the projective psychodiagnostic technique in use for some years now consisting in the study of personality through the observation of casual symmetrical blotches that are interpreted by the patient who thus projects his own fantastic, imaginative world, his own way of perceiving, introjecting and externalising reality. But here despite an affinity that is at times persistent it is not the casual element that is worked or acted upon, it is, rather, precise introspective compositional projecting. In this sense, such a parallel is far from being two-dimensionally mechanical, his figures leads us to the sources of the very act of painting, to the roots of the communicative dimension of contemporary painting or, in other words, if we like, to the genesis of its lyrical consequences. Because like a watermark in his entire output we have a strong, palpitating, prevailing sense of painting, its triumphant taste, which moves Meneghetti’s every perception towards the completion of a majestically pictorial gesture even when the technical means employed, either alcohol or synthetic material, would only marginally allow for the use of this word.

Here indeed is the mystery and magic of the act, but here also is the intriguing suggestion, the seductive effectiveness of the emotional, psychic catalyst of these organised and reiterated nuclei of signs forms and colours. Nuclei that are meaningful thanks to the creation of emblems and taperings that cut archetypal furrows in the depths of our anthropological essence.
Meneghetti’s hand, heart and mind (the whole mind of course, both conscious and unconscious) disentangle the strands of memory and of life, they uncover uniformity and diversity, they construe rules, outline rhythms and interactions, establish meanings and emotional outcomes. On these spectres they project their own spectres, enigmatic minuets with neither tempo or logic, like a sort of preface to an existential tale, to a diary of emotions, to be savoured calmly, observed without haste, leaving them all their necessary time. Here then we have his «negatives», like thunderous visual metaphors, reconsidered from the depths of the sharpest feeling, these monads that are overcome by the intuition of things, immediately halting and coagulating emotion in articulated backgrounds, in mysterious shrouds, in succinct bodily imprints, the artefacts of a problematic, psychological and existential puzzle of extraordinary tactile consistence. A series of images that follow and repeat one another, and exactly in this repetition, stake their significant experimentalism, every evocative fibrillation, in radical poetry, a lyricism that wavers between conceptual abstraction and the underlying persistence of the figure, between anthropomorphism and perceptive dilation of the image.
With regard to this unrelenting repertoire, which answers a profound impulse in him, we need to pinpoint the common denominator, the binding element that supports the operation within its whole unquestionable fascination, which has its own pungent grace, and its own febrile seduction.

I would say that such a denominator could be identified in the vivid perception of existential sedimentation, that is to say the slow and perennial accumulation of that psychological matter which life deposits as it flows through the channels of the conscience, paving those unwitting memories into which dreams sink their roots. Precisely the trace of this subtle, impalpable silt is what needs to be sought, like a mute dialogue between the author and his material, in his works, in every form, in every image. This material and these works live then, though within their exemplary aesthetic autonomy, also in an abundance of symbols, as if carried and translated from a biographical chronicle, as I said above, which in these terms can transmute from a possible diary to a collective sentiment, a more universal narrative, the record and emotion of us all.
Indeed there is something here that transforms the seduction of the manual skill in art into the sense of a universal question: something that permanently recalls the shade of foreboding, like the breath of a dream or a vision. And the working of this evanescent intuition makes the artist the ambiguous, sibylline witness for us and in our name. This eclectic manner of working within the nature of the body, of objects and ideas, his poetry of impulse and meditation, is interwoven with a capacity for up-turning, for estranging and for surprising narrative art. For this reason he constantly moves along the cutting edge of strong linguistic and narrative displacement, deliberately sought amid lyrical excitement and classical contemplation, taking part in the vertigo of extremely expanded, absolute poetics, made all the more intriguing by the fact that the references to objective reality, to true reality, are purely speculative, metaphorical and symbolic.

Such, and so much is his concern for expressive and formal research, his vital need for an ever more effective relationship between idea and form, between feeling and result, and his fervent, limitless, investigation is so engaged that our artist’s work has a quality that I would certainly call alluvial, pressing, dense, youthfully relentless, an agradational sequence of profound images, of shudders suspended between shadows and surgical light.
But it must be said that this aspect, which would make one think of something scorching - that is to say: an art form that is «hot», almost hallucinated, a series of explosive outward-moving flashes of casual origin - comes, quite on the contrary, from a particular quality in his temperament, his way of approaching, experiencing the imaginative process, a quality we can call «cold». A quality that returns to very precise concentration, intensely inward, towards an intimate, global, interior project, recognisable in its severity and method and defines a working and thinking procedure that, slowly and painstakingly experiences within itself the even joyous, lucid ambition to meticulously explore every potential possibility, every effect and consequence, every drift.

Totally different, therefore, from the sacred fire and hysterical fervour of some of his colleagues close to the trans-avant-garde to whom he could be likened in language and methods, multiform intellect and technique, cosmopolitan expression, generosity and squandering of both brushstrokes and gestures..
Here then we have a profoundly reflective artist, an artist who sees and imagines his world from a kind of potentiated prospective, a super-observation, capable of making himself the object of evocative forms, the trigger of suggestion, of stimuli, of allusions…
It is because Meneghetti’s intimate interior working of the material of his imagination, the engrossed gesture of shaping it, involves moving in a field of communication that it cannot be placed on a purely aesthetic plain: it implies that the spectator, as a condition, reconstructs the underlying texture of meanings, evocations, simultaneous and allusive co-presence while standing before the image.

This is why, in this concentration of feelings and fantastic thought, the subjects pursued in his portrayals cannot be evaluated solely for what they represent. The true theme here, in other words, is never simply that which is “said”, but is intended to lie far beyond its value as a mere simulacrum, broadening (and stimulating our attention to unfold) towards further meaningful vibrations, towards other, and more hidden levels, like a sort of elementary, primary eloquence, a spring. An eloquence, I would say, that sounds to me like a willingness of the imagination (and specifically that very particular, intriguing part of the fantasising process that involves imagining not only thoughts or sentiments, but actually emblematic images) to bear the burden of experience; to invest itself, therefore, with that which is objective in the world and return it to us, its truth restored, in a transformation that is all the more subjective the more lyrical it is. His is a communicative ability that is wholly worldly, made of the truly concrete, earthly dimensions of the conscience and the senses, depending less on the aesthetics of creating, than - more persuasively - on his intrinsic, seductive, issue of poetic truth.

Giorgio Seveso