In an age when so many artists pursue the ghost of “the spirit of the times”, enslaving themselves to the imperatives of the market – one need only remember the tumultuous “fight for paintings” of 1989 in Cologne – there are some independent spirits who work sheltered from passing fashions. Among such exceptional artists is Renato Meneghetti, who for more than thirty years has taken part in the most fundamental issues of our times and has followed a path towards a form of “total art work”. He speaks many languages, he has experimented with almost all the modes of artistic expression proposed since the 1970s, without privileging any one particular. Each time he chooses the means with which he feels most comfortable. Meneghetti indubitably represents a key figure for anyone who wishes to understand how the last four turbulent decades have been reflected in art.
Lucio Fontana recognised early the full talent of this “positive young man”, as he called him: “he profoundly assimilates the experiences of the major exponents of contemporary art, integrating them in an incessant search to find his own path”. And even in the digital era ideas are not lacking for the man who has expressed himself as painter, sculptor, architect, photographer, designer, film director, and musician, to the artist who has worked in film, theatre and video.
Let us stop and consider what impressions a fifty-three year old European artist today might have absorbed and interpreted throughout his life.
In the 1950s and the heroic 1960s, defined even at the time by radical denial, Pop-Art caused a sensation, the border between art and the entertainment industry began to blur, and the icons of the American Way of Life captured the surface world in an orgy of colours. Minimal Art reacted to this by concentrating on the strength of simple, ascetic and well-proportioned forms. In the 1970s we witnessed the mixing of artistic genres, at one time distinct, and an opening towards the new possibilities offered by photography, film, video and performance. The Dadaist protest, which between 1910 and 1920 altered the concept of art at its roots, did not remain an episode, but offered fertile stimulus for artists who wished to break down any barriers of category. From that time the phenomenal world has appeared more enigmatic and multifaceted. The exegesis of the work of Duchamp became the dominant ambition of Arte Povera, of conceptual and body art, of Fluxus, of Tachismo, of the happening, of performance, and of video. Joseph Beuys went in search of the buried sources of Western civilisation. The threatened natural world was the point of reference for artists exhibiting at the Biennale of 1978.
At the Biennale curated by Jean Clair in 1995 a challenge was made to the hegemony of abstract art, which had prevailed for almost one hundred years and which had reached the most isolated corners of the earth. At the same time however, that art had become old and tired and often affected by the habit of déja-vu. It had nothing radiant left. At the centre of the Jean Clair exhibition was man, the principal object of art for more than four thousand years. In the anatomic “demonstration” of the Uomo di vetro in natural size the confines of art and science were blurred.
In the work of Meneghetti, who was painting at the age of ten but was later to take a degree in architecture and design, the human is protagonist. The artist is not interested in the heroically standardised man, but that which is latent in him, an exploration of the unconscious and its mysteries. From the Urlo espressionistico of monotypes in black and white and the collages produced after 1960, anxiety, fear and death emerge. Cadeva la neve ad Auschwitz (1965) is certainly one of the most disturbing examples of a work in which an artist confronts the atrocities of the Holocaust. A white sheet blackened by smoke and absorbing a multiplicity of colours covers the city of the dead, delimited by a barbed wire collage. Above this the evanescent contours of the photomontage of a skeleton can be discerned in the dark. The feeling evoked is one of the tragic nature of a scene tinged with poetry but lacking aggressiveness. Contestazione in musica, a washed collage from 1966, is a mirror of the young rebellious generation that would emerge in 1968. A large eye looks hypnotically from the painting, surrounded by a vortex of impetuous musicians. Among subsequent works on paper one in particular remains impressed in memory: Anticodolore (1984). It is also a masterpiece from the graphic point of view: a large head, soft and white like lime, emerges from a dark neutral background, displaying empty cavities in the place of eyes and mouth, torn away by horror. The human has always had to bear the pain and fear of death. The Pareti perdute, “concretely” poetic, recall the Arte Povera of Alberto Burri, the misery of the existential human condition. In a catalogue for a 1969 show Lucio Fontana wrote, “In every work a spontaneous and fervent social need is present”.
As an architect and designer Meneghetti followed a severely ascetic style, in which a comparison can be made with Minimal Art. The Luigi Bonfanti Automobile Museum (1972) at Romano d’Ezzelino (Vicenza) reveals the intimate connection between architecture and technics. The Progetto in steel plate has the appearance of a futuristic automobile repair shop that takes on the shape of an aerodynamic gallery programmed for high speed.
It is as a multimedia artist that Meneghetti’s talents fully unfold. Inspired by video and electronic media, but also by sociology, neurology and psychiatry, and with a similar set of tools, the artist begins to explore the human in a way that is altogether new and no longer interested primarily at external appearances. It was necessary to confront the new digital media that was connecting the entire world, as it had created a new conception of the “image”. Art history, which proceeds by isolating the image in a spatial-temporal continuum, had only timidly approached the dispersion and decomposition of the single image in film. Today’s persuasive force of “images” no longer emerges from painting, but from the image in movement. With computer simulation creative ideas can be visualised. The experience of increased speed, mobility and communication will one day be assessed as the fundamental event in the formation of 20th century consciousness.
The “limits” of psychic situations increasingly constitute the focus of Meneghetti’s artistic work, as in the pictorial book Insania (1981), in the contorted Carrozzerie umane made in plastic or in the Fagocitazioni. Photographic works also belong to this sphere; they mark the relicts of actions and situations created by Meneghetti using his own body and fixing them on video. The standardised “cloned” human, depersonalised, comparable to a mannequin, appears in the orchestra of Ricominciare dalla musica in the film Divergenze parallele (1981/1982).
If the Fagocitazioni, very personal creations from the 1960s, remain within the realm of painting as images, they also come within the sphere of Body Art and performance. With the Fagocitatrici, Meneghetti visualises elements that lie beneath the surface. He visualises them using a rich palette, in a chromatic virtuosity that highlights the nature of this excellent painter. But even then he was more than a simple painter. A “fago” (phage) is something that takes in everything. The mouth is the most important organ. The meaning of the verb “fagocitare” (phagocytose) used in blood cell biology, roughly means: the large consume the small. For the “fago”, “to have or to be” is of no importance, only “to have or not have”. Daily the human absorbs the most diverse influences and in this way becomes completely dependent on a flat and banal reality. The human is depersonalised. Genetics and biotechnology, due to the manipulation of genes, has begun to construct the new human, the image of a human free from thousand-year-old cultural, theological and philosophical references and conditioning. The Fagocitatrici visualise the existential crisis in which humanity is stranded today. With the loss of the individual’s personality, we are forced to confront the mortal tragedy of the human – this is perceptible in all of Meneghetti’s work.
In the history of art, Meneghetti’s X-rays, which from 1980 crown all his preceding artistic work, can be placed at the arrival point in the process of emancipation of light in European painting. The French Impressionists were the important precursors of this evolution. Due to the absence of extreme contrast, represented by dark shadow, the intimately bipolar character of light was removed. Coloured light spread a uniform luminescence, irradiated from within. Delaunay and Klee represent further stages in this long journey. Klee painted the overabundant fullness of the universe in the transparency of colour and light. “His artistic genius was like a camera, adjusted on the infrared and ultraviolet waves of the universe”(Werner Schmalenbach). Finally, thanks to the invention of photography (from the Greek phòs + gràphein) we attain “writing with light”. Meneghetti had a precocious education as a photographer before he began to use the X-ray in 1980 as an artistic means to service an art that aspired to the salvation of the human. The X-ray image is painted onto with colours (and as such becomes alienated); it is pigmented canvas with alcohol-based paint or emulsified canvas with acrylic. The transparency of this diaphanous image reflects, beyond any aesthetic convention, the mysterious interior world of man where life, disease and death lie hidden. Bones without flesh means death. Transparency can also mean transcendency.
“I have used X-rays not as ready made, nor as a provocation, but to see and to show inside the human, how we are “phagocytised”, deadened, boned and now also dismembered and cloned by society” – Meneghetti interpreted his work in this way; as a means and instrument of social and personal liberation. Recently an illuminating monograph has been published by Mario Goldin on Meneghetti’s X-rays from 1982 to 1997 (Venezia, Marsilio).
Modern art, science and High-Tech continue to intertwine. Even the British choreographer Rosemary Butcher renders the interior world visible, that which lies within. As such she uses X-rays as a source of inspiration. From the reflections of Aristotle on the relationship between soul and body – the human did not value matter very highly – and the representation of the human skull in the cult of reliquaries by our ancestors, to examinations of the brain in tomographical reproduction processes, the road is a long one. The neurologist Antonio Damasio, who is researching how the source of emotions is situated in the brain, assigns consciousness to the lower parts of the brain which have something to do with the body. In this process of knowledge art for him solves an important task: “As in science, art expresses experiences and in those recognises what is universal. Inversely, scientific knowledge is made clearer if thought takes on an aesthetic form.”
Multimedia work never made Meneghetti – contrary to what happened to many artists of his generation – discard tradition as useless rubbish. His Rivisitazioni wish to say, look behind in order to move ahead. The Autoritratto da insania in synthetic on paper (1982) makes reference to Marat, the freedom fighter who was assassinated and painted by Jacques Louis David shortly after his death in 1793. In later X-rays, those of the late 1980s, Meneghetti visits other periods of art history. In a self-portrait divided in two parts from 1985 and entitled L’uomo, l’opera (alcohol on paper) the right part replicates the left part of the head, portrayed frontally in X-ray. The rigid frontality recalls the idealised self-portrait painted by Albrecht Dürer in 1500, at twenty eight years of age (Monaco di Baviera, Alte Pinakothek), and which in turn makes reference to the numerous examples of the “true face of Christ” (the true icon), circulating in the late Middle Ages.
Even before the discovery of the Röntgen X-ray in 1895 artists had gazed deeply into the human body. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who was professor of surgery and anatomy in Padua from 1537, defended the dissecting of corpses as fundamental to an understanding of the structure of the human body. His extensively illustrated work De humani corporis fabrica (1543) founded modern anatomy. In 1775 Grand Duke Leopold I of Tuscany founded the Museum of Natural History and Astronomical Observatory. There, up until 1850, numerous artists rooted in the Florentine tradition of sculpture in wax created about 1400 anatomic preparations in wax in which parts of the body were left open for examination. Artistically and scientifically these sculptures are of considerable importance. The surreal juxtaposition of the emotional aspect with an objective anatomical analysis can be likened to Meneghetti’s self-portrait.
Today, in the digital age, the contemporary artist must be able to master different tools. The beneficiary of static and passive art no longer exists. The principle of plurality and rich and creative spiritual mobility, make of Meneghetti an artist who provides for a vital and active participation by the public in his work. I am certain he still has a lot more to say.

1998, Erich Steingräber