"8th October 1998. INTERVIEW WITH RENATO MENEGHETTI"
edit by Christiane Peyron

WHY DO YOU PAINT?
Meneghetti replies that he is unable to give an answer, but his life story in itself would almost seem to justify the decision.
He made his debut when he was seven years old, “My mother was too poor to buy me painting materials, so I took some old rags, made frames with pieces of wood and prepared colours with green leaves, dry leaves and olive oil.” He reveals himself as an extremely resourceful, creative and organised man, someone who never gives up.
At eight, while he was at the cinema, the reel of film broke and while waiting for it to be repaired, he collected a few fragments. At home, he made a fully-operational projector from a light bulb and a shoe box. This experience made him curious as to how things worked and led him to penetrate them deeply through his radiography paintings. Meneghetti never stops asking himself questions and his refusal to give up means that he often finds the answers.
At 12 he took part in his first exhibition at Bassano in Italy, and its success incited the jealousy of other painters. He was deeply affected by this because someone brimming with love needs to have their love requited. As soon as he starts speaking, I wonder whether his struggle against the animosity he generates is actually his greatest stimulus. Perhaps he would find consolation in Georges Brassens’ song: “Les braves gens n’aiment pas que l’on suive un autre route qu’eux”.
However this very jealousy inspired him to become “the greatest and the most accepted”. In the meantime my initial question “Why do you paint?” provoked an answer that gushes forth spontaneously “I have had to paint since I was seven. If I don’t I feel disconsolate, sad and cold. I have always painted, it is something that comes from within.”

More aggression, more spontaneity
“In 1980 I felt I had to be more aggressive in my work. I wanted more immediacy and so I used photography. It was nothing more than a hunch, but as it happened I was wrong”, he says.
“I realised that painting was not immediately understandable and that the world was in a hurry, so I used photography. I compiled my book “Insania” from the results”, he explains.
“Insania” is not so much a reference to madness as to something unwholesome or unsound. All these self-portraits balance precariously over an abyss. His works bury you, give a glimpse of the light and then swallow you up again. The alternation between decomposition and recomposition is fascinating, as Nietszche said: “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you”.
With his hand on our shoulder, Meneghetti pushes us towards the chasm of all human horrors: solitude, desolation, disease, perversion, avarice, bestiality, death, decomposition, the putridity that suffocates the beauty of life. Then he lifts us back towards the light and launches us towards everything that ennobles the human soul, music, literature, art, love, sublimity, rebirth, love of nature, a Christ-like ideal. He reveals himself to us at his most horrible and his most sublime, because his face is always the subject. However what is extraordinary is that on entering this universe, it is not Meneghetti’s reflection we see, but our own, naked, vulnerable and horrified.
A giant step towards self-consciousness!
To compile his book, Meneghetti’s took more than four hundred photographs. “It was predominantly research work”, he specifies.
His photographs are very successful, as is the music he composes. He has also released a film, which he directed, wrote, made and starred in. The film has four characters, “Me, me, me and me again” and examines his contradictions using his music as the soundtrack. It won an award at the Venice Biennial and in Berlin, where his name appears beside those of Fellini and Bergman.
All this on a hunch which he still insists was wrong!
“I also made a mistake by making avant-garde things such as the car museum. So I told myself that I was a painter and a painter I would stay!”
Don’t you feel that you have retraced your steps remarkably? You have the choice of two forms of genius ..... and the courage to make that choice.
But then again....
“When my film, books and music were released,” he explains “some declared them ingenious, while others said “This is sh..”.”
The exhibition he held when he was twelve made some painters in Bassano jealous. He found it intolerable that half the public criticised him harshly and that they didn’t love him. So he decided to abandon these ingenious forms and to stick to his first love, painting. “I made a mistake and I went back to my painting”.

The dimension of Meneghetti’s paintings
He is a man speaking to mankind. “Search for yourself because you do not know yourself” and one day he hopes to find what he is looking for. He gets the impression that he is not actually responsible for some of the things he does, and he is not far wrong. No one knows where those touched by genius draw their inspiration.......least of all those touched by it!

The relationship between music and painting within Meneghetti
His music is spawned by his painting, and he simply translates it. Fundamentally, his music and painting complement one another since his music offers so much to his painting. Applying this idea to his radiographs, his music allows the admirer to enter the paintings. Or, more subtly, it prevents the other side of an individual from being locked out.
He has never studied music: “I wrote it on a computer”, he confesses (as far as some like Meneghetti can confess).

What would be left of Meneghetti if all your works were washed away in a great flood?
“I exist outside them because I continually die and am reborn”, he replies. “My life begins every morning”.
When he was young, he was loath to sell his works. Whenever he did, it felt as though an arm, a finger or a leg had been amputated. At 21 he felt completely mutilated and attempted to buy back his works. If anyone refused to re-sell them to him, he would steal them. He takes the same attitude towards his daughters. He says that he would have killed anyone who wanted them without a second thought and admits: “I am perfectly capable of resorting to murder”. Nowadays, however, he accepts that both his paintings and his daughters have a life of their own, “Other people also have the right to experience the joy they bring”.

Picasso and Meneghetti
Comparing his life and behaviour to Picasso’s is almost cause for offence: Meneghetti considers himself way below Picasso, excessive in everything, in love, wealth, passion, contradictions, capable of the worst ....but also of the best. He reinvests the considerable sums of money he earns to raise the level of his painting. He is a businessman who organises his artistic success by sacrificing everything for his art, knowing he has a great mind. And he’s right. He emanates creative, productive, sexual waves of rare power and exudes a magnetism that certain, at times perhaps roguish, historical figures were supposed to possess; Picasso, for one. This would explain “their” relationship with women.

Death
Meneghetti vanquishes death with his radiographs. He teases it, caresses it, tricks it, courts it and loves it, which is the best way to exorcise it. “No one will ever know how much I fear death or how much growing old petrifies me: it’s something that gnaws at my brain.” Perhaps this is why he has run enormous risks in overexposing himself to radiography to create a work of such complete spirituality. Finally the radiologist refused because it was too dangerous.
“To secure immortality”, Meneghetti concludes, “I will leave nothing but my great mind!”. Who would dare contradict him? Not I for one......
He admits that his photographs, in all their diversity, may be flashbacks of past lives as animals, vegetables.......

And hibernation?
He would certainly hibernate so that he could be reborn every so often.

Renato Meneghetti is a completely extraordinary person. He is omnipotent and primed with a strong erotic charge. He is feminine, charismatic, emotional, filed with a touching desire to improve (but is it worth ruining one’s health over?) and a tremendous need to be loved.
He is half tormented by the inner businessman, who is precise, concise and generous, half by the sensitive, creative, narcissistic, ingenious artist. He is caught between the powerful forces of good and evil that live inside him.
Meneghetti is a man whose passions have been taken to extremes, a man who is fighting conflicts he cannot resolve, but from which he draws his strength.

Christiane Peyron