BEYOND THE NAKED EYE
edit by Vittorio Sgarbi

In evaluating contemporary art it is necessary to grow accustomed to living with the impossibility of making historical evaluations. With great historical precision Roberto Longhi pre-empted the modern trend by closing the season of Bolognese art in his first university lecture in 1934 on painting in Emilia with the name of Giorgio Morandi whom he saw as an absolute value on par with Ludovico Carracci and Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
At the end of a century hallmarked by Berenson, Venturi and Toesca, today it is no longer possible to say anything. We can, however, classify, notice and catalogue in the same way, or at least give signs of a personal taste, by becoming critics following the current trend or group witnesses, that is, by becoming ‘official critics’. Consequently there is a critic for ‘Arte Povera’, another one for ‘Painterly Painting’, another one still for those beyond the avant-garde and another for ‘Secret Art’.

It is as if these were all separate, parallel, non-communicating worlds. It is exactly for this reason that those who think they can summarise the fundamental experiences of contemporary art in the names of Kounellis, Merz, Penone or De Dominicis will probably want to recognise the fact that this is also the same period of Salvatore Fiume, Gianfranco Ferroni and Giuliano Vangi. These are contemporary authors who lived through the same period of history and who have substantially similar backgrounds. The critic supporting Wainer Vaccari or Vito Tongiani will not be able to understand those who have gone beyond painting and sculpture to encourage the artist engaged in gesture, such as in the work of Lucio Fontana. This very work produces the extremely particular condition because of which every artistic event and every endeavour in research prevents the critic from being able to assume a position or line-up different from the barracking for any particular soccer team. What has been lost is the very evaluating principle of an artist’s work. The perplexities increase and the critic’s own role must be re-assessed. Rather than clarifying for others, the critic augments the complexity of the problems and engenders doubt in his own self.
Renato Meneghetti’s work seems to exist for this very reason. The questions beg themselves: How should we judge it? How should we classify it? What importance should we ascribe to it? First of all, it does not seem to be the work of an amateur or dilettante. This, unfortunately, is what could describe so much contemporary painting, even by well known artists, which is illustrative idle talk.

If ‘God is dead’, everything is allowed. Like so many other avant-garde artists, this artist from the Veneto region also starts out from here. Meneghetti, however, finds his own way through that area beyond the naked eye made visible by X-ray. He wants to see what lies within man. He does not, however, search for the spirit of man as Renaissance artists and so many others afterwards tried to do. Meneghetti searches for the structure supporting things, the skeleton. His painting is particularly original in its involuntary aestheticism inasmuch as it is halfway between the footprints left by Antonio Recalcati and the emulsions of Andy Warhol. Though using a different means, the effect is analogous. The X-ray seeks out hidden forms. Its relationship to photography is like that between noumena and the phenomena. The shapes of the hands, the intestines, the cranium, the dental arch and the cervical column reveal the original relationship between the human organism and the universe. The X-ray photographs offer themselves up to pure contemplation and bring you to intuit not only the foreseeable shapes but also a mystery beyond the shapes. Something similar occurs in the experiences of informal painting where in its final form the work reveals an image greatly differing from the ones it had started out from. Meneghetti succeeds, however, in something even more persuasive.

For example, in Ritratto di Renato in fase creativa (1996) a succession of images of the cranium depicts the phases of the moon and evokes a visual equivocation. The painter increases its mysterious attraction via a highly learned chromatic process which confers the shapes not with the expected colour but with an non-existing, unreal one which is even more estranging.
The author multiplies doubt in this way and combines the unrealness of the X-ray with the unrealness of a non naturalistic chromatism.
In Meneghetti’s immaterial paintings the use of colour is never predictable. The aestheticism in which he operates is not pre-meditated. Some outcomes, for example, in the works which depict the column of the cranium have an almost Japanese-style formal definition. They reach the highest points of decoration which are also the farthest from every functional necessity for which an X-ray, especially of the human body, exists.
In his most recent and formidable cycle, Radiografie, Meneghetti explores shape in its hidden yet distinguishable nature making it noticeable but not quite completely exposed to light and full understanding.
By examining the entire range of his work one realises that even when he was using instruments different from X-ray the heart of his interests was always the perception of this type of otherworldness lying in the innermost recesses of the soul. Even when he was very young, Meneghetti defines formal identities as strongly anti-naturalistic. This can be seen, for example, in his first works in painting in the Fifties or in a series of frescoes on panel, the Pareti perdute, which he carried out in the Sixties under the obvious influence of Burri but with a livelier materiality. There is nothing informal or abstract in these works. There is, however, the will to define an almost architectural, compositional structure which is always evasive and never completely recognisable.

Meneghetti’s art, therefore, in its production embracing almost half a century, has nothing experimental. It is, instead, guided by a profound necessity to which the artist, as can be verified in the consistency of the results, cannot but succumb. Even certain small cloth oil paintings, which are probably the very first works by the artist, give the impression of this second nature.
They are things of daily life, simple scenes such as the Lavandaia at work (1954), or a few bottles on a table (La tavola dello zio Nino, 1959), or even roe deer captured in the landscape (1964). The composition is extremely simple, linear. It relies on very few elements as if to offer a front of resistance to the corruption of time. Meneghetti strives to capture the essence of the objects or of human profiles (Dawn, 1964) in the conviction that in the secret of the form, in the ‘internal form’ of the objects, lies their real nature. Meneghetti’s Radiografie have quite an explicit precedent in the monotype. Meneghetti cultivated this kind of painting almost uninterruptedly from the Sixties right through to the Eighties. Here there remain few descriptive shadows in ink on a light background, ready to dissolve as can be read in the eloquent title. Still in the 1960s Meneghetti strove to investigate the body through technical and modular reproductions typical of collages. He enlarged the forms of the human face transforming them in an unnatural sense so as to underline the tension of the muscles and cheeks. Meneghetti did not want to reproduce the beauty of the face but its vitality.

An imminent disaster seems to be threaten the existence of these works (Antico dolore, 1984), as if a tragedy were about to scourge mankind much like an atomic bomb or a nightmare immediately turning into matter and flesh. These works also allude, however, to a conquered peace which can be jeopardised no further. Intangible and vital at the same time, they are like creatures suspended in a pagan limbo (Ritratto di Winston, 1997). Organic forms reveal distant echoes and the body becomes a place of vibration. This perception of reality is like a haunting semblance, <a mirror of the spirit. It is the perfume of the underworld of which art exudes the intimate quintessence. It is not, however, simply a deathly inclination or the long wave of the taste of Symbolism.
It is, rather, the very same raison d’être of the image, its capacity to evoke death in a non rhetorical or theatrical way, as with the presumption of a terrifying eternity not in this world for men. Meneghetti has never lost his field of images, his objective. This is the singular proof of his consistency of vision which always searches for the supernatural form like those who pursue their souls.

Meneghetti unsettles the instruments and methodologies of criticism. He forces you to reflect on both the necessity of artistic expression and its continuity despite the variety of means used. He is the living proof of the existence of a profound formal consistency.
In this he is even more rigorous and ascetic that Recalcati’s experiences which, as we have already pointed out, converges nevertheless with Meneghetti’s. What appears to be transient and unstable in Recalcati becomes the principle of Meneghetti’s constant method. This in turn becomes his unity of vision which places its focus on what the human eye cannot see but which the X-ray can. It is as if he had adopted this instrument so as to see more, to paint what normally prevents itself from being seen.

This is not only the unconscious, emotionality or feelings as in the case of van Gogh. Meneghetti thus ‘sees’ the non-visible as physically existing and substantial. Perhaps the reference to Munch can best explain Meneghetti’s psychological condition beyond any dramatisation. In merely formal terms his condition resembles a complete harmony which wants to be particularly uncompromising and which does not want let dilettantism get away with anything.
Meneghetti’s undertakings are important independently of any evaluation we might make. We are destined to be void of any sound evaluating criticism anyway. His undertakings meet a true necessity and not experimental research. Meneghetti is essentially uninterested in game playing and the sensual endeavour. This is because he does not want to capture or seduce you, despite the obvious aestheticism. He wants, rather, to force you to tune into his sensitivity but with his own special vision.

Vittorio Sgarbi