Painter, draftsman, poet, musician: much more than an artist, Fausto Melotti (Rovereto 1901 – Milano 1986) was defined as a galaxy. A lover of ceramics, from which he takes his first steps, following in the footsteps of Fontana and Leoncillo, Melotti is known for his lively and euphoric brass sculptures. It is through this material that he lends himself to contortions and flights, like the free movement of spheres supported by chains in Pendulum (1959-60), where Melotti stages a game of oscillations and symmetries, of playful irregularities as in Trophy of Hunting II (1961), arousing pleasure and amusement. His ensembles tell stories and fables, legends and dreamlike myths, in which the nameless and faceless protagonists, as proposed by us in Untitled (1960), define an extravagant and fanciful universe. A world often symbolic, entirely determined by graphic and linear counterpoint, without thickness and weight that exalts the dimension of dream and narrative. Beyond the little theaters scripted by Melotti himself, the audience is required to participate in constructing their own narrative through the association of individual sculptures and in their interpretation. In this airy and marvelous void of brass, as well as in the metaphysical sparkle of ceramics, as proposed in Circles (circa 1960), the individual sculptures move, seeming to free themselves from a concrete existence, dominated by gravity, to enter a plastic world that tends towards the immaterial and becomes musical. The philosophy of the immaterial and the musical implies a precise belief, that of "the spiritual in art," dear to Kandinsky. In fact, in his sculptures, one perceives a center, an "interior" space that, as he himself asserts, believes that "art is arrived at through art, the fruit of personal intuition: therefore all our effort consists in teaching the small heroism of thinking with one's own brain" (Quadrante n. 14-15, June-July 1934). His entire production, from the early drawings of 1925 to the sculptures of the 1980s, makes it clear that, as Germano Celant writes: "his abstractism must be assumed in a spiritualistic and metaphysical perspective, with references to the symbolism of the sacred and the magical. And although it may appear irreverent from a figurative point of view, it always admits at its origin the spirit or the word, the sound or the breath with which the universe was built." The need for an inner feeling, to go to the origin of oneself and the world, is not dictated solely by the artist's Catholic culture, music, poetry, and lightness, but also reflects his degree in electronic engineering, as if sculpture should reflect an atomic or at least microscopic dimension, traversed by a flood of particles as in the case of Sculpture 21/A (1970), the first realizations of which date back to 1935. Since the 1970s, his works have been part of or regularly exhibited in museums around the world, including the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, demonstrating the importance also confirmed in 1986 by the Golden Lion for the memory of La Biennale di Venezia.
In 1999, the retrospective exhibition hosted by the Galleria D'arte Maggiore g.a.m highlighted the unique fusion between sculptures and drawings by Fausto Melotti, emphasizing the integral relationship between these two facets of his artistic expression. This exposition reiterated Melotti's emphasis on the significance of drawing in the creative process of his work, underscoring his unwavering commitment to exploring new avenues of expression. The exceptional variety and depth of his drawings illustrated his continual artistic evolution over the years, reflecting his extraordinary sensitivity and relentless pursuit of new forms of visual expression.