Fausto Melotti

4 - 30 June 1999

Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. presents the work of Fausto Melotti accompanying a selection of important sculptural works with a rich corpus of works on paper to dive in a path characterized by the conceptual and executive coherence that makes Melotti a master of abstraction and of harmonic organization of space.

 

Melotti's art denies the material condition of images and brings out figures that live as mental projections and that borrow that little quantity of matter necessary to live as a sort of spatial drawings: the graphic sign traced on the sheet finds its equivalent in metallic fibers, in small brass nets and in pieces of fabrics that constitute the mature expression of the artist. Strongly connected to his sculptural production, Melotti's works on paper constitute the creative core of his artistic research during the 30s, a research that in the years of its maturity will re-emerge, deepened and expanded.
Melotti's first and rare drawings from the late 10s and 20s of the past century are on display to tell us about the artist's tendency to express himself through sculpture: in these works the  desire to materialize shapes in space refers to Carrà's post-metaphysical language and De Chirico's theatrical spaces. These are stages in which that “stylistic and perfect sense of the plastic apparitions that characterize his work emerges; that post-metaphysical aura suspended and alienated in time and space; the unraveling of an imaginative [...] and highly filtered figurativity, in which splinters of abstract geometry and decoration, of biomorphism and narrativity, intertwine in equal formal responsibility, in a different representational world ”(Flaminio Gualdoni). The plastic counterpoints of these graphic configurations are translated into space in the interesting repertoire of sculptures that the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. presents on this occasion; works in which the aerial qualities of the most iconic expression of Melottian art are celebrated in filaments of matter that is charged with powerful expressive resonances because of its extreme and harmonic reduction (Catenelle, 1959-60; La vacca lunatica, 1961; L'abbraccio, 1961). The exhibition continues, following the path marked by the exploration that Melotti leads on visual traces suspended between air and matter: from the years of the debut it continues up to the Fifties to end up to the Seventies and Eighties, when the artist's research focuses on sculptural experiments characterized by metaphysical atmospheres (I magnifici sette, 1973; Solomé, 1978; Zefiro torna e il bel tempo rimena..., 1979), which touch themes connected to the artist's profound musical inspiration (Canone variato III, 1972; Contrappunto piano, 1973): a collection of works that give shape and make tangible a multiplicity of narrative, mythical and fairytale nuances.