It is a sort of expanse of white snow that stands as a symbol of Simone Meneghello’s exhibition in the spaces of the Pavese Foundation, who here exhibits his “sheets” of stories, transpositions of works rendered, experienced and told from a distant point of view, or at least this is the appearance. His is not quotation or homage as an end in itself, but is a commentary on a poetic work rendered leaving behind the old polarity between the real and the imaginary in the certainty that the journey is fundamentally accomplished within oneself. Intimacy where we are reunited with everything that is dearest and most indispensable to us since childhood, the conquest of the word and the written, in that happy fusion of which art must be a necessary testimony, as a verification of the “duties” of art, this reconnaissance now addresses the theme of the journey and the intimacy of the work of a great man of letters, and of what survives their meeting, their possible, fruitful contrast.
Simone’s works are messages: sheets, envelopes, glass bottles, paths of books that cite and contain, as if wanting to reiterate an enchantment, Pavese’s verses and words. Exposed in this way they tell images of time in space, images of space in time, images in which temporality is crystallized in spatiality, spatiality in temporality and the presence of absence. Works that tell the story of life, words, made their own by the complex past of the man/artist: they are visual modules, figurative surfaces destined for what we could define as “memory theory”, the extreme synthesis of an ideal transposed and applied to a sort of common imagination linked to the word.
Meneghello’s works make it necessary to enter into a suspension of judgement, they require the strength to move away from the search for a rhetoric banally linked to making art. His is not abstract art, as a description of a misrepresented reality, a story of things or simply interpreted facts, but are works that give a sense of expectation as if a broader vision could explain their purpose in vain. Emphasis should be placed on some of the key characteristics of Simone’s work: the gesture, or his desire, which together with the improvisation and the shadow of the material, outline the characteristic features of his works. His quotes from Pavese seem like snow, on which the shadow of the writer’s words has left vague and imperceptible traces.
Shadows of memory that escape the banality of form and are tinged with emotions, thus breaking the barrier between the self and the other, insinuating themselves into the acquired memories of those who observe them, opening up in a vague whisper for those who want to savor the emotions that have guided the hand of the artist, of artists, in expressing a retrospective gaze: it is the manifestation of the fulfillment of an existential project, which unfolds in the collective and individual history of a common heritage, which allows one to return with one’s gaze at the origin of that tension, from which action and project arise. In this perspective, the end is its own beginning: completion identifies the genesis, the “opportune moment” in which an element emerges capable of changing the flow of time and the value assigned to things with their mere manifestation.
There are places in the soul where there is no shouting or sound of instruments. It seems like the rustling of light clothes on a distant summer evening, because down there everything is ancient and true at the same time. They are open spaces and they are a symbol of our times, but at the same time an archetype of a common research, the comparison and interaction between those who speak the same language in art leads to moments of rare repeatability. There is a road in the middle traveled by Simone Meneghello, and it is a road that does not refer only to itself, it leads but at the same time collects those who choose to see it while passing by, it is internal and external to itself, as in an inverted perspective everything is there, within reach, and everything happens in a very long present.
All we have to do is follow with our gaze what remains of us and see the surface of the past time, frightened only by the idea that someone might come and not find us there. Over there we just have to put out the last cigarette and finally follow that road where we will meet, if luck or fate are our friends, that poor little staggering and lost thing which, however, will be able to teach us that tomorrow the sun will rise again and that the smile of beauty has words that will make us forget, even if for a moment, the proverbial “absurd vice”.
R.P.
The catalog with writings, containing images of the works on display and some unpublished works by Cesare Pavese, can be purchased on the Cesare Pavese Foundation website