The next event at the Blue Gallery is Simone Meneghello’s solo exhibition/Meneghello meets Borges/from December 2025. With a critical text by Alberto Dambrouso. The events at the Blue Gallery are conceived and created with the utmost naturalness. A naturalness played on minimal differences, on daily interaction, on encounters and surprises, with a continuous close dialogue, at the bar, talking in the street outside the gallery, inside, developing an enormous load of ideas and meanings. Silvio Pasqualini personally constantly places himself on the naturalistic level of those who cultivate the land, select the plants and seeds, wait for the fruits to ripen, always keeping the field well fertilized, listening fertilely to what is gradually forming. Pasqualini deals with artists who at least try to enter into meanings, trying to signify. This time Simone Meneghello meets none other than Borges, an artist, a poet, a writer who lived around the Blue Gallery. You can still hear the sound of his footsteps along the Rio Terà Canal. Perhaps in his time daily life was more intense, generous and diversified. There were fewer university choirs, fewer Bacari Tours, perhaps. Probably the Toletta Bookshop, instead of being a massacred place of losses and regrets, was more creative, populated by authentic intellectuals, who aimed to shake up the obvious, and the homologation of the obvious. Today everything seems blurry. Simone Meneghello deals with meaning, sense, letters, the semantic study of the word. In his previous work with Pasolini, for example. The meeting with Borges takes place in a defined, precise place. The incident happened exactly inside the space where the Blue Gallery is located. This is a cause for great reflection, it cannot be accidental. Meneghello’s work deals with the limit, the threshold, creates gaps, creates paths. Already dealing with gaps and paths is a very beautiful and interesting exploration. Exploration is an action that almost always occurs without the use of cognition. We must highlight the clear difference between research, which is a specialization, a profession, and exploration. The explorer is the one who dares, pushes forward, courageously, following unbeaten roads, creating new paths, taking personal risks. The concept is this: today like yesterday, you either create paths or find excuses. This is part of the challenge in these areas. Simone Meneghello does precisely this work of writing made up of heaps, with a compilation from other times, the one that was done with the typewriter, bar after bar, rewriting texts, in this case by Borges, but he does it systematically with other texts. For example, he is tackling the Bible, rewriting it completely, layer by layer; he writes on it and then writes on it again, creating stratifications. They are heaps, they are accumulations, or even compressions. Simone Meneghello on Borges applies a controlled designation of origin action. Borges, who lived in Italy as well as in France, in Meneghello’s work transforms himself a bit into César’s France, the leader of radical compressions and expansions, such as the crushing of objects, cars and motorcycles, something also done by industry, but in the artist’s case performed with very different meanings. Aesthetically and culturally, Meneghello’s work also brings us back to another work: the cancellations of Emilio Isgrò. By erasing the words, Isgrò gave a new meaning to the text. New codes, new solutions, subtracting some words. Meneghello’s work is a poetic work. The artist defines it as a work on the threshold. Interesting because art is always about measuring yourself beyond the limit, on the edge of an important dilemma, between staying within the threshold or going beyond. We mentioned César, Isgrò, but we could mention Fontana, who was among the first to seriously concern himself with going beyond space. That concept of threshold, the cut, Fontana’s spatial concept, focuses on this aspect, crystallizes it. Meneghello’s operation is a very refined and radical operation. A source of art, of great impact, executed with almost priestly care. Pure, true research. The artist even defines it as “limitism”, focusing on the limit and beyond the limit. Interesting because it happens in the contemporary context in which people are very far from these reflections, they deal with conventions, fashions. It is also a work on time, of accumulating time, because time remains, it remains. In the end, Meneghello’s work becomes a black stain, but there is everything behind it. Like the black box on airplanes. It records everything, this is the peculiar aspect. Rewriting has the value of rereading: every time we reread we find ever deeper and different meanings, new connections, new landscapes. At the Blue Gallery, Meneghello will create a path of books, always compiled in the same way, with the accumulation of jokes. Aesthetically they are dark stains, elaborated piece by piece, brick by brick. The books start from the ceiling of the Blue Gallery, descend with a small diagonal inclination to the floor, and from the floor they mark a straight line up to the window, simulating crossing the window itself. Other tiles will be placed beyond the window. During the night they will obviously be removed and kept inside the gallery. Almost forming a bridge, which crosses the street from the gallery, and crosses the places where Borges lived. The echo of the street completes everything. For Blue Gallery/Silvio Pasqualini/from December 2025.
Fragment of text present in the catalogue, cit. “Simone Meneghello has been carrying out for years a rigorous research of minimalist ancestry focused on highlighting the limits of language. After the comparisons of the last few years with two great writers such as Pasolini and Pavese, the artist presents at the exhibition at the Blu Gallery in Venice some of the works born from the comparison with some of the literary works of the great Argentine writer and poet Borges. The exhibition sees the presence of few object elements installed within the exhibition space. They are mostly books or other objects that recall the archetypal shape of boxes, as well as actual glass vials within which, as in the messages left in the bottles in the sea, letters of a shattered and consequently undecodable speech appear, in fact, in the works created by Meneghello, the words, shattered or overwritten, lose their original function, showing themselves only by their bare and bare presence this modus operandi, as well as the fact that his works are placed in an interstitial space between being and non-being, losing any functional aspect (books cannot be read, boxes cannot contain because they are bottomless, bottles cannot be opened and in any case even if the words contained in them were opened they could not be recomposed) it will be easy to understand how many considerations of an exquisitely philosophical nature are at the basis of this research. The artist writes about what happens in his works through this practice of subtracting discourse: “When language compacts in my works, when letters overlap and get lost in the typographical density, something happens that goes beyond writing: language shows itself in the moment in which it can no longer say. The works are the passage, the threshold where the word stops being discourse and becomes presence”. For the artist the work is born and has reason to exist as a metaphor of the experience of the limit, in that liminal space in which presence and absence coincide. Meneghello’s works do not communicate any message and the spectator is invited to place himself in front of the work not with an interpretative attitude but on the contrary to experience the work as a “living” experience. “Art” – writes the artist – “for how I live, and my work is never communication. Crossing the threshold means accepting that every sense is already exceeded, that language – the moment it stops – reveals its belonging to the One, to an undivided time”. It therefore appears clear that Meneghello’s research is placed in a suspended time, of metaphysical memory, in which the dialectic of opposites is positioned in a perfect balance. The comparison with Spinozian Metaphysics appears evident. The substance in Spinoza is what is in and for itself In other words Spinoza means that the substance owes its existence only to itself as happens in Meneghello’s works which take on their dimension regardless of their non-significance but by the sole fact of existing and being experienced. The substance in Spinoza conceives a God – Nature it is the totality of all things. God – nature corresponds to the geometric order of the Universe governed by immutable laws. What else is that One and that undivided time mentioned by Meneghello in his works if not God himself? The comparison with Borges’ literary work arises above all around the concept of simultaneity. simultaneous. (In some works the overlap also develops in a single point. An entire text is present, stratified, superimposed in a single point, as for example in the work entitled “The Aleph”). Thought, which to be understood is “unrolled” in time and space, in my works returns to the primitive, primordial state of Being, of One. This “rolling up” is the device that exposes linearity to its limit, transforming it into visual simultaneity. In this sense, my work does not represent simultaneity – it makes it happen”. Hence the dialogue with Borges was born. In his stories, simultaneity is always present as vertigo: The Library of Babel, The Aleph, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Book of Sand. Borges tells us that time is not succession but an already completed totality; that every book contains all the books; that the Other is a figure of the same identity that one looks at. Meneghello based his research on these concepts, however declining it on a visual level: his books cannot be read but contain everything. They are compacted encyclopedias, presences full of meaning that can no longer be decoded. By crossing them you do not enter into the meaning but into that space in which meaning and matter coincide…”
Alberto Dambruoso