EXHIBITION
Michael J. Sheehan Center, Lubbock - Texas, Marzo 15th - May 31st 2013
St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri,  July 15th - August 31st 2013

20 LIVING ARTISTS CELEBRATE THE POPE WITH NEW WORKS CREATED ON PURPOSE FOR VENUE:

Carlo Balljana - Cecco Bonanotte - Pedro Cano - Ugo Cortesi - Giuseppe Ducrot - Roberto Ferri - Ruza Gagulic
Maya Kokocinski Molero - Girolamo Giro Macchiarelli - Renato Meneghetti - Igor Mitoraj - Francesco Mori
Mimmo Paladino - Luca M. Patella - Stefano Pierotti - Massimo Pulini - Marco Nereo Rotelli
Giovanni Tommasi Ferroni - Natalia Tsarkova - Giuliano Vangi.

The exhibition will present circa a hundred items, including precious memorabilia, vestments, documents, works of art, gathered from various Vatican collections and religious orders. It will also include a group of artworks by living artists, who will celebrate the pope with new works created on purpose for the venue. l encounter the man the world knew as pope and the saint that history has proclaimed. They will view Blessed John Paul II's personal possessions as they see and hear the events of his miraculous life unfold on museum guide screens.
Catalogue "Blessed John Paul II - I have come to you again" DE LUCA EDITORI D’ARTE

"Renato Meneghetti: faux x-ray"

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.

Francesco Buranelli

“I SOUGHT YOU”

edit by Francesco Buranelli

Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church

see the essay in full version

“9,37 pm”

2013. pastel on canvas, cm 60 x 60

Renato Meneghetti’s refined sensibility has given us this touching masterpiece, an extreme historical and artistic synthesis. In that fatal instant – at 9.37 pm precisely – the Church went into mourning for the loss of its dearly beloved pope, but it also knew very well that “a pope had died, the pope had not died.”

This in extreme synthesis is the truth that Renato Meneghetti makes his own, by continuing to work on the theme developed in his earlier work Life – Kiss to Camilla. The artist only needs to make a few barely sketched references with calibrated touches of colour, like the Holy Father’s skull-cap and pectoral cross, to stress this fundamental belief in the continuity of the papacy. Meneghetti, like no one else before him, succeeds in paying homage to the dead pope without rendering any of his physical features, and yet the pope emerges all the same from this completely monochrome canvas.

F.B.

“St. Peter’s May 13th 1981”

2012. Photographic print on aluminum
and kristal. Triptych cm 60 x 180

Meneghetti use his technique (x-ray) to create the triptych devoted to the attempted assassination of the pope in St Peter’s Square on 13th May 1981, the liturgical feast day of the Madonna of Fatima.

An attempted assassination that, as Meneghetti reminds us, was planned in every technical detail.

F.B.

“For life - Kiss to Camilla”

2012-2013. Visual art, pastels and oil on canvas, polyptych 25 portraits cm 153 x 153 x 13,5

Wishing to take as his starting point something that goes beyond the image, Renato Meneghetti returns to painting and goes further than his x-ray experiments, by focusing on ultrasound scans. He uses a long technical process to manipulate a photograph of John Paul II in profile and sets it next to a sonogram of the foetus of his granddaughter Camilla, creating the basic image of the work through a meticulous, time-consuming use of Visual Art.
He then transfers it to twenty-five 35 x 35 cm canvases using an emulsion technique, repeated and serialized in bright colours, in Pop Art style, thus creating a kind of mosaic, to which he gives the finishing touches using pastels, coloured pencils and oil painting. At this point, the artist adds movement to his work by exploiting the thickness of the frames, and creating a three-dimensional panel with three different levels of high bas-relief. A luminous white cross, the symbol of the purity of infancy and divine light, with the Pope giving Camilla a tender loving kiss in the centre, emerges from this brilliantly coloured backdrop.

F.B.

“Suffering and Faith”

1997. x-ray and alcohol painting on canvas, cm 246 x 117

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. Here, by manipulating an x-ray of a humerus bone and an x-ray of a lung, Meneghetti “creates” a fantastical imaginary flower – perhaps a tulip bud – in vivid shades of lilac and purple, to demonstrate, according to John Paul II’s teaching, that through suffering we can achieve a state of grace and beauty that goes beyond physical pain and leads to real joy.

“It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace that transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else, evidences the forces of the Redemption in the history of humanity. In that “cosmic” struggle between the spiritual forces of good and evil … human suffering and the redemptive suffering of Christ, constitute a special support for the forces of good, and pave the way for the victory of those redeeming forces”.

F.B.