"Renato Meneghetti: faux x-ray"
edit by Francesco Buranelli (Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church)

Since 1978 Renato Meneghetti has developed an artistic language of his own by using a “faux” x-ray technique and applying it to pictorial subjects of the Great Masters of the past. Gillo Dorfles was the first to see Renato Meneghetti’s experiments with x-rays as artistically important and innovative, since they introduced new languages into contemporary Italian art. Achille Bonito Oliva has underlined Meneghetti’s ability to reconstruct, by in fact destroying, the object of the unconscious, and thus to confront the origins of existence.

This research was conducted by “looking into” countless objects and pictorial masterpieces of all times ranging from Caravaggio to Giotto, Perugino, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte. Renato Meneghetti was the first artist to use x-rays as a support for his works. An insight that enables him to censure and to skeletonize appearance – appearance as deception or appearance that deceives – and to link the realities represented to the idea, if not to its actual origin.

By methodically “dissecting” the object or subject, he arrives at the unconscious of man and of things. Through the filter of the x-ray he discovers similarities between signs, objects and anatomical details, which he then composes to create a dream, or at times a nightmare.
Then he enlarges and develops these elements, fixing them pictorially and chemically to create the final image, the work of art.