COSMOGONIC AND APOCALYPTIC
edit by Francesco Gallo

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper”
. S. Eliot

Renato Meneghetti’s images impress themselves on the mind like raw inflictions obstructing normal visualisation through an incessant sense of apprehension. Such is the degree of enigma encompassed in their vision, poised between the analytic and cognitive on the one hand, and poetry and witchcraft on the other. For ever discontent with the results, always experimental, he is forever intent on new, unusual revelation: starting from traditional techniques, assuming we know what to expect, we are inevitably disappointed or disturbed; employing unusual methods, where we have no clear expectations, we are often reassured.

In truth, we are drenched in a culture of originality: every salubrious relaxation of frenzy and iconoclasm is mistaken for pedantic or decorative indulgence. Experimental today is not a psychological condition it is an anthropological reality, a craving for estrangement, to be exercised in the gross conformity of violence, the instability of the self within the maze of things, with disjointed vitality, driven to squander rather than hoard, thus blending absolute verbalism into the paradox of a relative universe.

This proposition is intended as a general consideration, founded on three volumes which span Meneghetti’s complete output: edited respectively by Achille Bonito Oliva, Meneghetti opere 2000-2006, Electa, 2006, (which includes a belligerent interview with Tommaso Trini); Gillo Dorfles, Il corpo come tempo, Il corpo come luogo. Radiografie, Skira,2003, (containing a difficult conversation with Maddalena D’Angelo); and Vittorio Sgarbi, Pittura e altre arti. 1954-1999, Skira, 1999.

This thoroughly encyclopaedic and critical collection aroused my interest and raised a series of issues regarding his eclecticism, his ability to cover an extensive range of creative fields. From incorporeal drawing to invasive architecture - without splitting hairs in linguistic snobbery, purity or pertinence - he operated as befits an artist, deftly, fully engaged, translating all conceivable philosophic conditions to objecthood, leaving to others the task of commentary.

To his advantage Meneghetti has the gift of words, endowed with understanding and hermeneutics, which is however a considerable handicap in matters of objecthood. What seems logical to me appears unacceptable both to Tommaso Trini and Maddalena D’Angelo, they are too taken by an illuminist stance to accept a poetic viewpoint which they consider unintentionally self-absorbed.

I should point out that I find that these two interviews embody the mirror-like aspect of his entire output, constituted in a dialectic that magnifies the entire scene, charging it with energy and dynamism that are the expression of the total modernity that ultimately intersects it, in technique as an imperium, Apocalypse Postponed as Umberto Eco put it.

Though today we are in the full domain of spectacle and fashion, a mature and codified phase when compared to how amoral and random it was, Eco’s analysis, integrated with Fukuyama, Foucault and filtered by Guy De Bord, attempts to analyse the truth and read the present without relaying on authoritative justifications for that which is either self-legitimating or has no reason to be. At risk of creating a microcosm in opposition to everything, even to itself, or being insignificant, the threshold of absurdity reached in both declarations of the death of God and His triumph in all places, sive natura: I stand with Meneghetti and not with Trini and D’Angelo, who are too preciously attired to be convincingly linear and coherent.

Everything here speaks of transversality and sudden love affairs, a compendium of life experience within a physical and metaphysical substantial, a heresy of irreverence and the rules of the market. I start from the diverse and diversifying analyses put forward by Bonito Oliva, Dorfles and Sgarbi, with whom I totally agree, and their outline of a historical path necessary to understanding the genealogy of Meneghetti’s languages. These cannot be accused of being illegitimately linked to the same parent: his early paintings, frescos on wood from the sixties, matericismo inspired by Burri, from the sixties, architecture, design, cinema, publishing, sculpture and monoliths. And the x-rays, classifiable as artworks and as studies, evoking both the unconscious and the emotions. However, they are also projects, venues, reasoning; always on the borders of recognisability (though after Duchamp, nobody can be denied an ID); always dealing with a remix of the concept of culture itself: no longer a historically definable, systematic, connotation as in a general treatise, but a continuous calling of oneself into question. New questions arise and demand the elaboration of new answers, unless we wish to remain the prisoner of our own muteness and deafness.

Ever since the sophists, everything has had its price, no matter what. Today’s market assigns a material value to everything. Whosoever wishes to elude this is looked upon with suspicion, just like Renato Meneghetti who, thanks to his work in the field of advertising, has been freed from the dictates of others without falling into the trap of pure divertissement. He addresses a different sociality, replacing possession with contemplation, sight and touch that gains through simply being, beyond the seduction of having.

To favour one moment over others means violating the integral character of what is an organism, which as such, is made up of many parts, some explosive and objectified, others implosive and subjectivised. It is a the response to an excursion that needs to be interpreted with particular, secret codes, elaborated in an interior laboratory, which never rests from one dream to the next, spanning the magic of Merlin and the observations of Galileo. Dealing with general concepts of chaos or the secret calculus of entropy, implies awareness of that which is existence, in other words movement, but also that which forebodes of death: static and stillness. In any case we are used to perceiving epidermal incidents, those that reflect light and make themselves known, while it seems as if subcutaneous phenomena do not exist.

This aspect of initial invisibility, of secret essence, is the domain of the x-rays, asserting the indestructible bond between art and science; it is different from the invention-discovery distinction which is quite removed from painting. This oldest and most cultured of his techniques remains the centre of his attention, the same attention from which works such as Anatomie impossibili, gli Optional, gli Insania, i Clandestini indifference, Omaggio ad Akira, Global Folly, Strutture segrete, Paralleli vertebrali, were born.

These are just some of the chapters in the encyclopaedia of his imagination, each one a phenomenon of his inexhaustible desire to represent which has kept him in a perennial state of grace. Therefore, we find him at his ease in a multiplicity of technical and material solutions. We should not be surprised however, unlike some critics, since art is first and foremost a mental exercise and behaves as such (thus it should be codified by the artist and deciphered by the critic). It is neither philosophy, logic nor rhetoric, it is energetic visual language. Its use is in being seen, and if it sets other languages in motion, better still. However, visibility is generally necessary and sufficient. It is enough to observe how the artwork often stays for an undefined time while criticism can be, in many ways, just a matter of fashion, full of catchphrases, consequently completely outdated. This cosmos of Meneghetti’s with more than enough disorder at its core, never passing the limits of entropy, beyond which every organism dissolves, contains his world and is an authentic alter ego.

Throughout Meneghetti’s output we can observe a strong sense of artistry which attracts him to work with most any material: choices made by circumstances, and a strong source of contamination, with references to everyday things, intellectual life, and some references to his own biography and biology. In this sense we can always observe a considerable exchange between the mnemonic cognitive and the vitalistic foundations which emanate from his deep impulses. These have to do with issues of sensual instinct and lead to the magic of manipulating material, the invention of signs and all such circumstances that are referred to as intuition or inspiration. It is clear that we are dealing with a restless spirit, dissatisfied with what he sees but also with what he does not see, therefore his fantasy works towards the elaboration of a fabric of art where essentiality is immediate, sharp, overpowering limits and conventions, improper.

Altogether, it seems I have encountered a raw nerve of modern creation, the fleeting present calls the skilful to act, to wrestle with simulations and dissimulations, the shortcomings of the concept of order, to reassess the individual at the height of his wandering. The only viable alternative to immobility, once all geometries are spent by modernity and evil utopias: which were ‘something’ and it will be a sad day indeed, should we regret their passing. Meneghetti provides us with a corpus ermeticus, which, nevertheless, is a map, the question we face is: how do we read it?

This certainly does not mean that I would undersign Meneghetti’s work lock stock and barrel; we could only expect that only from the artist himself. It would have little sense to embark on disciplinary orders so different and distant, even if each diversity and distance today are in a state of regulatory crisis - even perceived short-term as inverted parts. What must be said here, however, so I am not forced into a crazed monologue by lengthy contemplation, Meneghetti standing as the final chapter, regards traditional critical language, a healthy does of self criticism is needed to find the nomenclature necessary to express that which is not part of the already established vocabulary.

On the one hand the mythicization of words, the sclerosis of languages and the excessive protection of languages from contaminations, limits, when it does not actually deform the possibility of delivery of an event. On the other hand the ineluctable newness of artistic events, as well as scientific discovery, which often do not correspond to expectations, places us in a position of expressive incapacity debilitating the events themselves, giving names that are inappropriate, imposing categories of beauty and ugliness that have no place there.

Therefore, we have the academia, which measures itself against the avant-garde, creating a useless incongruity. It is necessary to acknowledge the death of historical art, an event that occurred with impressionism and the avant-garde, the last steps of modernism, born in the eighteenth century and died in the eighties of the twentieth, taking with it space and time that were no longer those of the ancient world, whether pagan or Christian (in no way superimposed or amassable). We are left with a complicated rhizome, disorder, chaos, a conspiratio oppositorum which already seems too much, yet it is just making its debut.