A new work by Simone Meneghello entitled “Marco Polo’s path” will be presented in the gardens of Spazio Thetis in Venice. Work that becomes part of Thetis’ permanent art collection.
Simone Meneghello’s work was conceived and dedicated to the celebration of the 700 years since the death of Marco Polo and was created specifically – site-specific – for the installation at Spazio Thetis. The work, whose concept dates back to 2023, found its place and completion thanks to the availability of Arch. Antonietta Grandesso, responsible for the Thetis art collection, and Ferruccio Scabbia, an attentive collector of Meneghello’s works.
The trace, the path, is what remains, a memory, like the imprint of a passage. It is necessarily composed of matter (or its shadow) but is free in its essence from any burden, only an indication, in which the passage of time stratifies substance and dust, creates heterogeneous reliefs and gives chromaticism, but which then too is only an imprint, a simple trace of a passage, so as to be emptied of its own substance. Essence of a memory.
Visions of a street, coincidences that appear only casual, just as the shot, the indicated street, is not casual. Congruence must be sought, precisely, in this partial gaze, in the slight proportion between depressed and convex spaces and volumes, made to suggest a casual path that intends to make the idealization of a desire plausible but which, instead, inevitably denounces how our passing makes us blind to the complexity and pain of existences that are outside of our comfortable interior. Out there there is no cold or suffering, there is no space for words or looks, human beings made the object of a senseless but profound will that starts from the darkest outskirts of our soul, or of our Empire, dialogue, or rather, interior soliloquy where nothing else finds space except the incipient of the path to follow.
What remains of Marco Polo’s life and work are very few documentary testimonies but, fortunately and above all, what remains of him is his “Million”, a work which became legendary and proverbial already during his own lifetime. The work of Simone fits into this context, having for years explored the very essence of the written work, representing with his works what he calls, with an effective sentence, “the presence of absence” and also in this work, composed of volumes, without identifying titles, which trace the ideal path that starts from the Venetian Arsenal and leads to an idealized elsewhere, contains the ultimate synthesis of what the Book, for Meneghello, represents. It is a path that has no forks or hesitations because it possesses within itself, invisibly, all the indications to reach the goal.
R.P.