LONDON—
Waddington Galleries here is presenting through June 17 the first U.K. solo exhibition of works by the Italian artist,
Fausto Melotti.
The
exhibition will demonstrate the varied scale and materials used by the
artist, from small ceramics to monumental brass sculptures such as Kitsch Sunset (1977), which stands over two meters high.
Born
in Trento in 1901, Melotti was educated in Florence and went on to
complete a degree in electronic engineering in Milan. His academic
background, together with an interest in mathematics and a formal
musical training, all had an impact on his work.
In 1928 Melotti studied sculpture at Brera Academy in Milan, alongside Lucio Fontana
who became a lifelong friend. Both artists explored ideas of
“anti-matter.” While Fontana’s spatial investigations led to a piercing
of surfaces, Melotti constructed forms around space, contained openings
and balanced voids within frameworks.
During the 1930s Melotti was a central figure of the Milanese avant-garde, holding his first solo exhibition in 1935 at Galleria del Milione.
His experience of the war years spent in Italy provoked feelings of
fatalistic melancholy and led to an intensive production of small works
in ceramic.
The influence of the war would permeate throughout his later works such as Toy for a Dictator’s Son
(1979). This brass sculpture economically depicts two figures facing
each other at opposing ends of a balanced rod. However, the scales of
power are not level. One raises a rifle—having already taken the lives
of five figures frozen mid-fall between two worlds.
In 1961 Melotti was commissioned by the architect Gio Ponti
to participate in the trade fair Italia 61 for which he created a vast,
12-meter-high wall, made up of 800 unique ceramic tiles of which Untitled
(1960) is one. By the late 1960s Melotti’s transformation of
commonplace materials such as plaster and painted fabric allied him to
a new generation of Italian artists associated under the heading Arte Povera.
Several of the works in the exhibition have musical terms. In Counterpoint VII
(1971), this musical term is given a sculptural dimension. The
trajectories within each of the four cubicles are self contained but
share an overall harmonic structure.
In Untitled
(1976) a mixture of nature, geometry and music is delicately expressed
in brass. The outer structure consists of two branches of regularly
spaced circles set like annotated notes on a grid, while the inner leaf
stems curl into roots of a musical clef.
Melotti died in Milan in 1986 and was posthumously awarded the Golden Lion at the XLII Venice Biennale.
October 12, 2008 
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