EGHÈNETAI ! Darkness, not “shadow”. Light.
In Meneghetti art is “catharsis”. It Redeems!

edit by Don Giuseppe Billi

Renato Meneghetti, conceives and creates art as a cathartic event. The highest and most necessary. This is to say, expanding the idea to a universal vision, that art does make life “beautiful”, indeed it “saves” life (according to Dostoevsky’s classic definition), but through a process of redemption “ab imis”, right to “the depths”, down, from the darkness.

We could say that it is within his natural code, already from the first signs that appeared on cave walls: a dramatic testimony of the “bloody” fight for survival.
Since then, this totally “Panic” relationship between art and life has never been interrupted. If we narrow our field to modern times, the “plenum” was reached at the end of the nineteenth century, with the philosopher-artist F. Nietzsche and Wagner’s “total artwork”.
Then we have the “avant-garde”. But this “plenum” remains. The only difference, in the twentieth century, is that thought and technology no longer entrust experiences and expressions to the strict parameters of the image (more and more overused and overstretched), but also to extraordinarily rich and semantic references.
Let us look here at the problem of art, of the sacred and the contemporary; and their relationship regarding the theme of “redemptive” art.
It is clear that the scenario has changed after centuries of a glorious “holy alliance”. With the “Roman question” and the “Syllabus” (the magisterial document of Pius IX, 1864), the sacred and the profane are no longer two sides of the same coin, indeed they are two worlds, different, distant and, at times, hostile.
Art and artists were involved. This detachment created a lacerating and painful “tear”, Paul VI defined it “the drama of modern times”. It had a double value.
Yes, because within the new anthropological frontiers, where the inevitable mysticism of the human “animum” needed to quit the rationalist blackmail of positive thought, imprinted by the French, and the consequent “realism” of mind and style which led to a morbid “submersion” of the flesh, reaching, over time, a point of hopeless poverty (as in all periods of “nihilism”), art and the sacred – conceived together – inevitably repel and attract each other.
When “anti-modernist” views took the upper hand in the Church negative prejudices towards modern art reached levels of destructive rage, such as the pressing requests from the higher ecclesiastical authorities to remove the frescos of Severini from the church of Semsales, in the French region of Switzerland (luckily this was avoided). The idea was that sacred spaces were a “limbo” pacified and intranseunte, and with art, an orthodox and abstract illustrated projection of catechism.
When space was left open, thanks to intelligence or sensitivity, the “shock” of modern art reanimated the predictable, static figures of ecclesiastical “symbolism” with “splendor veri” (an ancient scholastic formula of sacred art attributed to Alberto Magno). Truly a shock if we think of the considerable reverberations of Expressionism, where the most famous and trusted name is Georges Rouault. But he also recalled the historical flame of stained glass windows.

Today, we are able to evaluate how much of that fear was justifiable at the time, now that we have come to terms with dangerous “relativist” drifts, certainly not to be confused or dated alongside the discovery of “relativity”, and those of non Euclidean logic and especially, with “phenomenological” thinking, which is not a reissuing of the immanence but rather the conscience of the Absolute, immediately, here.
And we are also capable of re-hearing (let us hope “receiving”) those intense calls towards the spiritual, the beyond, in more or less explicit terms, the “sacred”, that all the expressions of art, all of them, though they may be, by now, beyond the “confines”, have formulated in the most “bizarre” languages.
Let us take the “Dada” phenomenon for example, dominant, we could say, on the panorama of the entire contemporary era (even today). The founding (and redeeming) of its concept on the subjective freedom of the artist, was, perhaps, more important than the highly original works produced, which were often simple (but morally strategic) “recoveries” from the enormous dump of the technological voracity of modern times.
“Dada” has a substantial “transcendental” merit: within the rising ideology of the “regimes” it tended to decongest, both morally and aesthetically, the inclinations of thought and art towards those “fatal” super-race claims.
“Dada” could even be defined as the “prayer” of the anti-prayer, a “supreme” invocation to halt excessively inhuman political power.
It is not by chance that, alongside the “godless” Tristan Tzara, at the time of its foundation, we also find the highly religious Hugo Ball, a preacher of God.
Insisting, then, on the registers of synchronic and diachronic symbolism, as happens when we extend the horizon to significant stratifications of the sacred, we cannot but read Duchamp (from the urinal “Fountain” signed “Mutt”, to the “Great Glass”) in a way that has sacred references: both ancestral and some highly relevant to today.
Moreover, in depth, it is necessary also to apply a biblical “exegesis” (as Calvesi has done regarding the “Great Glass”).

Therefore, it is necessary to undertake a complete and overall re-examination of contemporary art and its relationship with the “sacred”. Here we are not speaking of sentiment but of authentic “spirituality”. Especially in the more extreme and formal choices: regarding figuration, material or the more surprising “gestural expressiveness”.
Let us take a sample for all – and we will stay within the most blatant notoriety – the works of Duchamp himself, Magritte, Max Ernst, Dalì and coming closer to our times Pollock, Barnett Newman, Y. Klein, Burri, and Fontana. They were all artists, who were certainly “instilled” with the sacred, often “unspeakable”, but real, physically “sibilant”.

And now we come to Renato Meneghetti who, precisely, can be viewed through his “abysses”, specifically his inventions – the x-rays – as an artist who, losing himself in man, vindicates divine “pietas”.
Certainly, within the aseptic visions, however compassionate, of the traditional artistic “credo”, he would not have escaped peremptory rejection.
Today, Renato Meneghetti is in Rome, holding an exhibition in four different locations, among these is “Sala 1”, on the territory – the Lateran – of the first Christian buildings, and therefore of the first signs “permitted” with the rise of Constantine and his donations to the Church.
The first Christian signs are the fathers of everything, and within Meneghetti’s particular and original style they express the intense “redemptive” capacity of Christian sacred art, which may not have an explicit “title” but, by working on the “flesh” it enters, vitally, into the sacramental economy of Christ and the Church. “Caro salutis cardo” in the words of Tertullianus an apologist of the early centuries of Christianity (“De Resurrectionis mortuorum, VIII, 6-7).
Let us also say immediately that the course followed by Meneghetti – precisely as an artist of the contemporary age – cannot be read within the old hermeneutic categories of “beauty, truth and goodness” from that old scholasticism found in manuals.
His “abyss” within the evils of mankind, his “skeletal” truth (the x-rays), his “pollution” between light and darkness, are not solved with traditional aesthetic formulae. First of all for a “new” artistic autonomy, belonging to the phenomenology of art, and not that fissist scaffolding of ideas, where models are deduced in “Platonist” fashion.
Moreover. Meneghetti, as we said, entered art with an effectively redemptive purpose that overrides the old scholastic passages.
The very term – “catharsis”, like “redemption” – can be like the “leitmotiv” of all art following the Christian event, even that which is readily enjoyable for aesthetic delight because, in any case, it gives us back the soul, in other words it “redeems” us as art psychotherapist James Hillman repeats in every one of his texts.
However in comparison to artists who make, of “catharsis”, a causal “origo” or a final prospect, Renato Meneghetti dives headlong, directly, totally, with his language stripped of rhetoric but entirely burnt, into the “fire” of “passion”. This totality leads to the “plenum” with a synaesthetic language, which involves, therefore the entirety of man’s “being”. Everything: body and soul, nature and senses. History and histories.

Therefore let us follow Renato Meneghetti’s terrible and exalting “ductus” at “Sala 1” in Rome.
The exhibition begins with a tunnel cut by sheets mirroring the blackness of a “quarry” imploded in the dark. Yet … yet at moments it spies the residual or reborn germ of life. The “seed” does not die, the seed that is in the barely perceivable pollen, in its “desire” for light, composed in subdued, soft Gregorian choirs.
And in the background a sacred-non-sacred story starts again. The Lord says in the Bible “… oh my people … not people of mine …”. But we try again. We set out again.
Now, the “skill” of the prophets and the artists is precisely that of “scenting” gusts of resurrection when the crushed destiny of death seems to reign.
With this fibrillating experience we cross the long dark “cavea” that synthesises the drama of life; and not only, but the arc or cavern of history itself where the stars have been extinguished. All. All … except those that “remain” in the “memory” of He who has transcended them.
Here it is obligatory to mention the “sacred”, because it is on the other term – after “catharsis” – that is the “memory” that art manages to take the supreme leap from recall (human and extinguishable) to memory (divine and is always ignited again).
The fact, more directly biblical and authoritative at this point, is as abundant as it is redeeming when there is nothing more in the mind of man, everything remains or is formed in the “creative” and reviving thought of God. “Into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lc. 23, 46)”.
Fundamentally, however, specify well these terms: words, meanings, symbols and exegesis.
Because art, though open to the mystery of the “ineffable”, in the sense that it always has the virtue of being here and beyond, in a time and space which naturally crosses the confines, is the golden way towards the “truth”, is itself a truth, no longer - with the Christian “word” - a metaphor; and neither an “illu-sion” (as upheld by the “weak thought” of the first manner, see G. Vattimo: “Philosophy for the present”).
Specifying darkness precisely, the cavern of death into which we fall with Meneghetti’s black “pneuma", is something other when compared to the “shadow”, which could refer to and has, in literature and texts of figurative art, very ample and variegated exposure.
To clarify, “shadow”, often created and evoked by artists, is “the other face of light” as can be deduced following biblical vocabulary and, then, the attraction to mysticism, both Hebrew (the “kabala”) and Christian (the holy poets and contemplatives, the highest among them, Giovanni della Croce) and by literary symbolism, uninterrupted through the centuries, up to Proust, Rilke and L. Borges (see his extraordinary work “Elogio de la sombre”).
These specifications are necessary to make a simpler characterisation of Meneghetti’s artistic, cathartic-redemptive “animus”. Darkness, not “shadow”.
An “animus” of substantial historical weight, which ties him even to the specific and intimate iconographic “catechism” of classical Christian tradition, on both its sides: occidental and oriental.
Western tradition, we know, can be dated from the Franciscan and Giottesque “incarnationist” choice, that is to say of the “incarnation” of the Christ love-wound, of chiaroscuro and perspective. From that moment (also in the preceding world of Cimabue), western sacred art underwent a crescendo of reckless tension in human drama, provoking and invoking the divine, reaching the apex of “profundity” in the Nordic renaissance, with Grünewald, Holbein the Younger and in the Latin world with El Greco and, forward centuries of generations, in the twentieth century, with expressionism (terrible and passionate) and, closer still, with Picasso (his “Crucifixion” dated 1930), Munch, Bacon, Sutherland (his “Crucifixion” from 1947, with its mass of disordered signs, housed in the Vatican Collection of modern art), with the convert and intensely Christian W. Congdon, and the limitless “harshness” (but wholly “material” God dying), Herman Nitsch.
Here we enter the physically “carnal” event of redemption, which – we can assert – experiences the “sacramental” economy of Christian rituality.
Peremptorily: it is either so or the sacred is dissolved in spiritual “vapours”. It is lost: flesh and truth.
And now Eastern tradition. It is a tradition addressing the “eschatological” choice of the icon. But, also this sublimated vision remains faithful to the decisive encounter of Christ with the depths: of evil, sin and, therefore, the very destiny of humankind. For redemption.
And it is a theme that is iconographically fixed over the centuries. From the Nativity, where the child Jesus is laid in a cradle made like a sepulchre and hangs on the edge of the dark cavern of death and hell, to the Resurrection, where the first act of the risen Christ is to descend, down to hell, portrayed again in “mandorlas” of black to take Adam and Eve by the hand for the ascent.
Meneghetti’s installation, conceived with ritual rhythm, visually and symbolically recalls the evening of Holy Saturday in church, which is called “the night of nights”.
It is the “holy wake”, which starts at nightfall (all lights in the church are put out).
Darkness is not only darkness, but the whole bosom of history, emptied by life with sin, where man is expropriated, laid bare, and he sees himself “schematised” (destroyed) as in an “x-ray” – with an eye, in parallel with Meneghetti’s forms – where the figure is only the imprint of total destruction. A tormenting thought comes to mind, the imprint of human forms on the walls of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Nothing else remains. A sign, this, more anguishing than the void.

But here night is dispelled by the light of the Pascal Candle. In the liturgy the Pascal Candle, which represents the risen Christ, is a living presence, but “discreet”, clearly perceived yet not invasive or clamorous.
Instead, in Meneghetti’s artistic-redeeming event, light flares up at the end of this dark path.
It is an absolutely plenary limb (“plenum” as we said) of the splendour of God. It is an “explosion” of light.
But it is also important that this “scream” of light, after the paradoxical and “mute” scream of man, then, should find a permanently habitable place. Like a “well”, and here we have a likening to the central well of the “hortus conclusus” in the cloisters of monasteries and convents. Or an Apse conceived as the liturgical “statio” of light. Or like a chapel or Crypt, fired more by a spiritual vision than an atmospheric pyre.
However, it is the end. Or better it is the homecoming of all the wailing and hoping consumed through the course of life. In Meneghetti this is symbolised in the absorbance of the white walls, white like the “shrouds” and the draperies of fifteenth century artists, among which stands the amazing, unique white sheet of Mantegna’s “Dead Christ” housed at Brera.

From the scream of birth, of the “natura scura” inscribed in the flesh and the infinite mappings of the body, to the “risus paschalis”, that is the Alleluia of Light, the new creational “big-bang” of Christ, rising and overflowing irrepressibly.
Redemption cannot have and does not call for any other “transfiguration” in signs, in forms, in matter other than this immense quarry of light.
But complete redemption is not given if all man’s sensorial capacity is not involved.
This is why, after sight and hearing (the sounds that scale death and rebirth) is smell. Flowers, fragrance.
Redemption is, truly, a cosmic “panic” event. The worship of nature has been, among other things, the “dream” of art, since the beginning. This is the direction intended by the critical invention of the term “tactile” by Berenson, referring to an understanding with roots in art, as well as with thought, with all the prehensile attention of a person.
Sight, to give the more complete aesthetic definition, must be compared with all the “channels” of the senses, sources of life, also because they are “windows” onto the Absolute.
Thus Meneghetti introduces the fragrance of flowers, after the desolate vision of their fall to death – the flowers withered, the dead petals along the way – is an integral part of the Resurrection. The Alleluia that is fragrant. The perfume of the “risus paschalis”.

Renato Meneghetti – in conclusion – perhaps quakes and assaults more with desolation.
But one has to have courage, more, one has to wager on the final embrace with the splendour of light, the most credible pre-sentiment of the Eternal.
From the void (“ex nihilo”) to everything, from darkness to light, from death to life, from silence to being.
“Eghènetai”!
In the prologue to the Gospel according to John, this is the word that ignites for salvation.
As in the “incipit” of the Bible, in the book of Genesis lies the key expression of creation: “fiat lux!” now, the key expression of redemption: “eghènetai”: “ the Word - became – flesh”

And the flesh - dark, wounded, extinguished – the flesh exploded in Light.

Giuseppe Billi