Observing, touching, perceiving its potential, understanding and assimilating it, in order to offer objects a second chance. Through craftsmanship and design, Simone Meneghello’s continuous personal research opens a dialogue between past and present, becoming a path capable of embracing the future through the idealization of objective thought.
The poetic ideal of Simone’s vision starts from afar, has its roots in those vague and indistinct lands of analysis, which lead him to incessantly measure himself with the intellectual and artistic innovations of his time, while always remaining in an apparently secluded position with respect to the most current dynamics. With rigor and discretion the artist conducts his research by recognizing and researching his roots, placed in an idealized world full of bibliographical suggestions. Like an alchemist, Meneghello, using notes, sketches and photographs, tries to transform the primary material, the writing or the authorial source, into revelation. He knows how to seek, in the evolution of his entire path, an answer to the great question of order over chaos and their only apparent dichotomy.
In the development of this research, he is able to reveal with apparent spontaneity a visual language that is oriented towards the reduction of artistic figuration to the extreme, obtaining with a few signs, a radical synthesis of the contents and bringing to the extreme profile the textual content otherwise imbued with redundant suggestions. What remains are ethereal figures, elusive phonemes in a silent world, in a balance that brings with it a powerful and irresistible ascetic force. The minimalism of Simone Meneghello’s creations merges with a style that we could define as naturalistic, in the sense of the reduction to the essence of a complex body, they are pieces of a mosaic that describe, in a concise and drastic way, those minute details that remain imprinted only in the deep unconscious of our mind.
Here, in this world, even if apparently dominated by images of a very different sensory impact in which the passing and becoming of the works seem to leave no trace, we rediscover very distinct handwritings that have not lost their unmistakable flavour, so delicate, almost dirty, that they are the same color as the life with which they are imbued. Colors of words, accents of earth that hover like smoke in a distant field, seem to settle on the objects, but they remain there for a short time, they already escape, underlining the volumes and movements, almost unable to accept that limit that, by nature, exists in the work. Thus a sort of interlude is constructed in which only the functional elements remain visible, the spatiality of the narrative is contracted into an ideal envelope which constitutes the transition from the content to the container. New space for narration.
Meneghello’s works are objects wrapped in a rigorous silence, that silence of someone who did not want to transform into an adult and who nourished his own sensitive purity in a culturally complex environment such as that of international fiction, remaining as if amazed by its grandeur and complexity. His is a journey into experience that the artist affirms by going beyond the visible surface, penetrating the deepest unknown unconscious, descending into the abyss to reach the essence of the subjects represented. In his work we rarely see the intervention of the human hand, a hand that seems to re-emerge from the depths of a dark dream, that of Simone is, instead, a work in white even if impregnated with the mists of the word, mists that seem to muffle every noise, leaving room for the purity of the image.
In these areas, the word, in fact, is not an essential element; on the contrary, a continuous effort is necessary, typical of a certain sentient nature of being, to free ourselves from it and then move on to pure images, accompanied by the dream, perhaps utopian, that the feelings and the narrated are transformed into images and the images into absolute sentences. Turning attention to that utopian reality mentioned above means giving a new meaning to everything as it appears and how it materializes in front of us, transmitting to us the ephemerality of everyday life, the truth of a dream or simply another reality but already elaborating them to merge their exteriority with one’s own personal emotional baggage, linked to the places of being and not of appearing. These paths lead Meneghello, after a long work of exploration into the depths of his own perception, to question the vastness of the potential that the sculptural medium and that of ideally representing a complex concept, leading it towards a complete artistic summary that can be told through images, could bring. The need, almost, to make images recognizable and immediately usable through a merely formal separation from the context given by the interpolation of objective structures until they are brought back to new life and a new semantics of the image until a given moment and a precise appearance are photographed. (The photographic medium would be another area of the artist’s work that should be explored to fully understand the depth of his work)
Simone likes to describe his work with the sentence he coined “The presence of absence” but his is and remains a space of freedom, a blank slate in which those of us who know how to be eternal children can trace the outline of their personal simplicity of narration. This is why this series of works should not be interpreted as a matter of simple utilitarianism, mere ornamentation, but, on the contrary, they will give the opportunity to incorporate our solitary internal space, to the point of making it part of a place in which the narrative and aesthetic elements support and envelop those who pass by, or stop among them, with eyes and minds free from conventions.
R.P. – M.N.
“… Overlays of letters to build words, of words to generate sentences, sentences, paragraphs and paragraphs of pages that will never be understood and can never be misunderstood in their real communicative intent. The presumption of the linear “alphabetic” language whereby development in space and time defines a possible way of communication and mutual understanding is an illusion. Every text, every writing, is freed from the position imposed on it by the number, by the sequential and linear space-time collocation.”
S.M.
A few words about what I observe:
From a point of view, which I could say mystical and monastic, this work is an interior search, on the meaning of existence, on our “being”, on what I am, on what we are. the works manifest themselves, I recognize them as such. This leads us to talk about the works, not as “doing” but rather as “observing”.
S.M.
And if there is a crayon against the machine gun
alors que le papier soit le champ de bataille
that our plumes in jamais gardent toujours leur livre
this is the most important thing about living.
D.S.
CATALOG