2006-2011 (vietnam/china/italy/brazil)
this_orient website

this_orient v.1.0 rome
this_orient v.2.0 salvador

The work of César Meneghetti looks like a constellation, thickened around the central theme of borders, defined as the separation and transition from one condition to another, and which the split-screen turns to trope. The line – which divides the colour and black and white screen area, for example, or divide the realistic shootings from the digital elaboration, and even the chromatic inserts applied simulates a collage – it is permeable, so that images spend freely from one half to the other. More like a frontier that no one front, one might say, with perhaps an image dear to the artist and filmmaker Italo-Brazilian who moves to ease between techniques, languages and different professional roles, so that in his search for the film, video and photography seem to pass its testimony. The stylistic solution reiterated by Meneghetti becomes a metaphor for the dichotomy that permeates his work including the abandonment of naturalism and the attraction for the immediate force of reality. The author captures it with in stills or in moving image, which is used to explore the social environment or to live the memories with the same “distracted attention” that allows him to absorb the atmosphere of places, to go beyond the mistrust to get in touch with people in search of what lies beneath the surface tensions and paradoxes, oxymorons and analogies, the wrecks of a world reduced to silence by historical, social or cultural. Despite the distinctions of gender, in fact, a common concern across both his films and documentaries, or his artistic pieces. The first stay in the Far East of Meneghetti is the origin of THIS_ORIENT (2010), a series of four videos produced specifically to this solo exhibition, where the urban or natural landscape, faces, sounds are transformed into abstract digital elements – overlaps, slowdowns, sunburns, induced noise or random pixilation – that propel the original scenarios beyond the limits of detectability, to feel abstract. The moving image of wires against the sky are transformed here into bars of a cage, folded tents or forest of films blown by the wind of electrons: the eye veil, barrier beyond which push or behind which refuge, network communication between the mesh However, the time slips away. The slow rhythms, and enveloping sounds (soudscapes by Matthew Mountford), conveying a meditative aspect to this altarpiece mail that, in different forms of repetition, hypnotic touches outcomes: an invitation to send in depth, therefore, and to avoid the fascination of exploring extensively. Meneghetti, this time seems to have been captured by an interior melody, like a vortex that transports him to a regeneration of Vision, toward pure images.

Francesca Gallo.

1 this_orient v.1.0 video digital PAL SD, cor, 6 minutos, 2010
2 this_orient v.2.0 video digital PAL SD, cor, 6 minutos, 2010
3 this_orient v.3.0 video digital PAL SD, cor, 6 minutos, 2010
4 this_orient v.4.0 video digital PAL SD, cor, 6 minutos, 2010
5 this_orient v.5.0 video digital PAL SD, cor, 8 minutos, 2011
6 this_orient v.6.1 video digital PAL SD, cor, 2 minutos, 2011
7 this_orient v.6.2 video digital PAL SD, cor, 2 minutos, 2011
8 this_orient v.7.1 video digital PAL SD, cor, 4 minutos, 2011
9 this_orient v.7.2 video digital PAL SD, cor, 4 minutos, 2011

photographic series VN 1 impressão lambda em papel metalizado Kodak sobre gatorfoam
photographic series HK 1 impressão lambda em papel metalizado Kodak sobre gatorfoam