In western tradition painting is capable of representing subjects and objects in action.
This is obvious in critical literature, which underlines and distinguishes the difference between the forces active within representation and the forces at play between the pictorial text, which informs, and its observer. The history of painting is also the history of the forces involved, in the text and the relationship between the text and the person who is observing it. Indeed painting depicts forces within the painting – such as compression, dilation, weight and lightness - and the penetrative forces of the eye directed towards the work.
Let us take the case of the Still life, a genre where the object and the means of its representation have a dominant role. In the still life – which de Chirico called “silent life” – the accumulated objects unfold in their obviousness, the privileged witnesses of our relationship to things. This pictorial genre is a true visual chapter of our philosophy, which understands – already from Plato – representation to be a mimetical matter, a returning of the world and also the affirmation of identity, which leads objects to even “project” out in relation to the surface of the painting. Flowers, fruit, game but also objects and instruments are often set within a dark niche from which they reach out to us: it is not our eye that grasps them, it is they who are moved by the demonstrative force of a life of their own.
If we shift our attention to other artistic and visual systems, this peculiarity of ours becomes clear. In the East, for example in classical China, painting suspends the presence of things in a sort of transparency: in Chinese landscapes things seem as if diaphanous, non-appearing (in other cultures – I am thinking in particular of nomadic civilizations – it is more the relationships between things that are represented).
How does this invasive ‘object’ appear in the works of Meneghetti – where a technological eye, the cathode tube, has sounded natural objects, recovering their intimate structure. An artistic operation that uses the technology of the x-ray inverts the ‘silent life’ of the object and uses the through-seeing forces of the eye. It is no longer the object that projects out towards us, it is the force of our eye, prolonged by its technical prosthetic, which moves towards things to see through them. Let us call this “trans-vision”.
The multiplicity of objects subjected to x-rays shows particular analogies with oriental representations: things still stand firm, but within their disappearance, and the object, examined with technological precision, stands there, ready to dissolve into transparency.
 What happens when a technology is applied to vision and it is transformed? All technologies, from the camera oscura onwards, have often been elaborated outside of painting and later been applied in the artistic field with transformations and evolutions that are anything but parallel: it is enough to think of the relationship between photography and painting in the second half of the nineteenth century or cinema in relation to contemporary installations. On the other hand every technical device has, when compared to the scientific field to which it is related, a specific autonomy, thanks to its complex integration into collective life.
In 1979 Meneghetti already demonstrated – anticipating communications strategies that are today visible to everyone by more than twenty years – that the x-ray, primarily used to understand the internal structure of an object, could reveal unexpected cognitive and aesthetic aspects.
Technology puts a new slant on the unequal impermeability of objects. In his Treatise on painting Leonardo dealt in detail with the quality of surfaces in their ability to reflect light or lighting. His eye was more attentive to our theme – that of ‘trans-vision – than many investigative experiments on objects carried out through distortion or prismatic positioning of the object on the canvass. Portraits seen from the front, in profile, three quarters, partially seen or from unexpected or forced points of view: this moving around objects tells of an attempt of the eye to penetrate, and the parallel analysis to painting the body carried out in anatomy comes as no surprise. The skull remains a secret structure until it is deprived of its mask of flesh that is the face. Hidden under the face, behind the variety of somatic features it shows, is the universal portrait of death.
The Vanitates of Baroque painting has made us think of subcutaneous vision as being reality in decomposition. The sense of being temporary tried to set itself, through the funeral mask, a portrait in ‘necrosis’, in the decay of the flesh, yet at the same time it attempts to reveal the permanent structure.
In the same way x-rays attempt to penetrate beyond the perishable skin of things and men, but contrary to the sculptural consistency of baroque bodies, they achieve a unique effect of dematerialisation, a disturbing effect which is Meneghetti’s relevant contribution to painting, to his technical means and is his visual quality.
The technological diagram penetrates the body, but it conserves its form, and in this composition of the penetrative and conservational forces lies the short-circuit that makes this visual experience vital and peculiar. The presence of the body persists and reveals itself in its supporting and potent structure, a diagrammatical scheme, figurative of an individual-model, abstracted from its own physiognomic mask, that is to say from its own identity. From the diagram the artist can create another figurative image (with another history and identity). Inverting the baroque process, Meneghetti can actually work with the x-ray plate adding new iconic effects, especially with colour.
The image penetrated by x-ray therefore is more than a diagram, because the form obtained and revealed is not the mechanical result of technology but the result of a new operation in vision, capable of transcending appearances through the mutation of presence. X-rays as Meneghetti uses them do not abolish or conserve morphologies; instead they suspend them, as if awaiting the gift of a new sense.  
Let us return to Leonardo. The definition of an intrinsic structure of the body is his, once this is understood the artist can represent any figure. The “idea” of the painting, the scheme of representation, is not only a “matter of the mind”, it is abstraction “in corpore vivo”. Living bodies are penetrable (flayed bodies) and those that are dead can by anatomised, but they can also be crossed through with the light of intelligence - “if you have science you do not need experience” - by an eye that sees into the very life of things. (This is the literal meaning of the Latin intelligere).
Observing such series as Al di là dell’occhio or Anima della Foresta we literally go to the heart of painting, with an instrument for the interrogation of things and also for their representation within a passage whereby they could be lost: the representation of the object can mean its abolishment.
This suspension and continuous passing from fullness to abstract – brought about by x-rays – has analogies with oriental art. Its light sign and capacity for lightening form, is in actual fact the contribution of a broader change within our culture, not towards the orient, but rather through an awareness of a reality derived from the immateriality of contemporary culture, from its vocation to the virtual, and the predominance of immediate and volatile forms of communication, such as television and internet. Our new awareness that the organism can be translated into a defined chain of information, DNA, lightens our somatic consistency as individuals precisely at the same time that it allows us to intervene better within it, and even to intervene in unexpected ways.
Therefore I would like to return here to the fundamental reason for Meneghetti’s operation, which comes from the light persistence of the individual that has been “technically seen through”. In x-ray representation there a dissolving force that creates a lightening and an invitation to disappearance. This tie between lightness and disappearance is a central topos of contemporary thinking: Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, more so than others, have shown us how we live in a society of production and projection only in appearance, where all things are generated, exhibited and projected towards us. Ours is instead a society of subtraction, where things have a vocation for disappearance under their own accumulation, senselessly and without memory. This paradox is concretely demonstrated in these canvasses, where, in the aesthetic dimension, it becomes possible to ascribe an intense value of abolition which pervades contemporary subjectivity, thanks to the transference of a technological device.
This emotional intensity marks the difference from many experiments where painting tackled the issue of transparency – between veils and glass, dust and cloud, the virtuosity of many portrayals – that is to say with glimpsing viewed as an extreme refinement of seeing. The diaphane is the resistance and delay that the object imposes on vision which would immediately possess things. Meneghetti’s intervention, on the other hand, is nurtured by the abolishing force of the eye itself, the strength of a prosthetic which grants the eye the ability to see through things without stripping it of its veil, without definitively abolishing its secret sense.
On this matter I would like to use as a metaphor the considerations of the philosopher and Sinologist François Jullien, which can be found in his book “In Praise of Blandness”. In classical Chinese thinking water – odourless, colourless and tasteless for us - is the most aesthetically savoury of elements: indeed, it retains the option of having all possible tastes as it has not decided to chose any. Insipidness, therefore, is not the absence of taste, it is the virtuality of all possible tastes: if you savour – sour, sweet or salted – you have irrevocably chosen and all the others have been lost.
This liquid and insipid virtuality of signs is conserved by investigation through x-rays where a vertebra can have equal likeness to a desert or a profile. The object before us has been lightened of ontology, presence, essence and meaning. What remains however is the eye’s desire for potency, which wishes, according to the Aristotelian concept, to press vision beyond appearance. In Meneghetti this desire for understanding takes its emotional form through the subtle application of colour, which according to the classical theory of art is the privileged expressive home of states of the soul: of sentiments, emotions and the passions.
Mention has often been made when speaking of Meneghetti of “seeing inside” and “seeing beyond”. But it is not only this: the act of trans-vision alters its object, it takes away presence and substance certainly, it lightens it without abolishing it and makes it change its colour in a chromatic and luminous vibration. The object becomes more insipid by losing some properties: thickness, its natural colour and the “atypical” simulation of tactile presence. The very choice of colours, translucent veils, upholds this lightening and causes a sense of rediscovery in that which we already know, or believed to have known.
There is a final point I would like to deal with, also because of its relevance to the exhibition: the communicative value of Meneghetti’s technique.
As we know all disciplines have their internal laws, which explains their coherence and sometimes, either their value or fortune. Allow me to say that it is too soon to judge the weight that Meneghetti’s experience will have on the future of art – in terms of emulation and driving force. It is evident, however, that as a visual device it has been broadly taken on board by the world of public communication and by its rising share which is advertising. I recall that Meneghetti began working on x-rays in 1979 and his results were collectively evident particularly between 1997 and 2000, in a series of important events, from Palazzo della Ragione in Padua to the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona. Anyone can see that in the same period the changing world of advertising began to employ – and uses even more today - this new expedient of vision. John Richmond, Modasky, Max magazine, Nokia, Bluvertigo, Energie, Kellogg’s, BMW, AUDI, Mina, there are countless brands that have decided to trust their image to this space between absence and presence that was inaugurated by Meneghetti.
An investigation could be opened here rooted in the experience of Meneghetti the top Italian public communicator between the seventies and the nineties. I feel that the tension between the artist and the creative concept developer has been solved by now wholly to the benefit of the former. There are understandable reasons why someone living in the incessant flood of advertising grasps the expressive potential of a form with particular meaningfulness.
A distinctive ability to aesthetically re-elaborate media and their technological devices.
But the reason behind his artistic value lies also in this base of communicative universality, in its virtual capacity to have, as Jullien would say, all the possible flavours of water.

2003-2006, Paolo Fabbri