Il Mondo di Fausto Melotti — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 15 → April 26, 2014

Fausto Melotti is among those spirits in the history of art and thought who does not allow themselves to be defined by a specific category such as “sculptor” or “poet”. An engineer by training and artist by vocation, Melotti spans a historic period where, in the Italy of industrial innovations and memories of more or less recent wars, abstraction would only be recognized a few decades after its earliest onset. His sculpture, which emerges from the void rather than subtracting from the whole, is the manifest of a refinement that avoids any cerebral gravity and is intended to be explicitly spiritual.

The twentieth century was a year old when Melotti was born near Trento in northern Italy. After spending several years in Florence, Fausto Melotti moved to Milan where he obtained his diploma in electrical engineering in 1924. Four years later he enrolled in the Brera Academy, which still remains today the absolute reference for artistic training in the region. During these years Fausto Melotti made the acquaintance of two personalities who would mark his life: the sculptor Adolfo Wildt whose atelier he frequented in Brera and Lucio Fontana, his classmate. It was in Wildt’s classes that Melotti was initiated into the search for pure form, strict control in the production of the work and the abandonment of any accident.

Fausto Melotti is dedicated to finding a geometry that puts aside any figurative representation, aiming rather to express a pure love of the material, whether bronze or ceramic. Melotti is also a professional pianist and seems to apply musical standards to his sculptures. It is not then a coincidence that the titles of his works are inspired by musical vocabulary. The compositions he completes evoke a harmony made of variations, intervals and liaisons. This intangible component plays a key role in the works of Melotti as they are floating works, of fragile appearance but with solid metaphysical roots.