Fausto Melotti

FAUSTO MELOTTI Hauser & Wirth at ADAA The Art Show 1 – 6 March 2016 Park Avenue Armory Park Avenue at 67th Street NEW YORK NY 1 Linea dritta, infinito stabile. Linea curva, infinito instabile. Dentro allo sposalizio-contrasto vive l’opera d’arte. A straight, infinite and steady line. A curved, infinite and unsteady line. Within this marriage-contrast exists the work of art. – Fausto Melotti 1 Fausto Melotti pictured with ‘I Sette Savi’ (1960) 2 3 INTRODUCTION ABOUT THE ARTIST Hauser & Wirth is pleased to participate for the first time at ADAA The Art Show, During the early years of his artistic career, Fausto Melotti developed firm with a solo presentation of works by Fausto Melotti (1901 – 1986), the Italian ideas about the relationship of abstract art to architecture, music, science and sculptor, installation artist, and poet admired for his unique contribution to the mathematics. ‘Greek architecture, Piero della Francesca’s paintings, Bach’s development of mid-century European Modernism. music, rationalist architecture – these are all ‘exact’ arts’, he wrote in 1935. In prewar Milan, Melotti was active among the artistic milieu, befriending the Through a selection of works spanning Melotti’s career – from the early circle of Rationalist architects of Gruppo 7 and joining the group of abstract terracotta Teatrini, to his signature, lithe brass sculptures – the booth traces artists who gravitated around Galleria del Milione. Influenced by his education the artist’s relationship with ‘the square’. Melotti studied music, mathematics in engineering and music, Melotti’s first abstract sculptures were geometrical, and engineering, disciplines that exerted clear influence upon his distinctive and echoed the young artist’s academic training in order, rhythm, proportions practice, however the square functioned as more than a geometric concept. and form. For Melotti, the shape was also a key structural device – it defined a space within which he could play-out his theatrical narratives and explore the The devastation brought by World War II resulted in a 20-year period of silence emotive possibilities of abstraction. and isolation in Melotti’s studio practice, which ultimately and profoundly altered his artistic vision. Much of his early work was destroyed by bombing In a brief poem, Melotti encapsulates his approach to line and space: during the war years, causing what would become a literal and symbolic rupture in the idealised abstraction of Melotti’s formative years. By the Linea dritta, infinito stabile. beginning of the 1960s, the artist had faithfully returned to sculpture, using a Linea curva, infinito instabile. new language of delicate threads and thin sheets of brass, iron, and gold to Dentro allo sposalizio-contrasto vive l’opera d’arte. express a more figurative, humanist style. A straight, infinite and steady line. With the introduction of figures into his work, Melotti produced his Teatrini, a A curved, infinite and unsteady line. series of enchanting, exquisitely crafted works rendered in ceramic, depicting Within this marriage-contrast exists the work of art. fantastical characters and surrealist narratives both universal and highly personal. These enigmatic miniature stage sets are alive with emotional and The focused presentation at The Art Show will be followed in April 2016 by poetic tension, balancing between representation and abstraction. The Teatrini Hauser & Wirth’s first-ever Fausto Melotti solo exhibition, curated by Douglas series fully encapsulates the lyricism and whimsy of Melotti’s post-war practice. Fogle and accompanied by a new publication. Melotti’s work of the mid-1960s and 1970s is perhaps his best known and represents a transformational period for the artist. Delicately wrought, almost fragile constructions became enriched by a new narrative, dream-like and symbolic. These weightless works resemble aerial drawings incorporating space, air and transparency. In later years, Melotti enjoyed critical success in Europe, with a first retrospective at Museum Ostwall Dortmund, Germany, in 1971. Melotti died in 1986, and was posthumously awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale that year. 4 5 Scultura n. 25 (Sculpture No. 25) 1935 (1976) Plexiglas 184 x 112 x 20 cm / 72 1/2 x 44 1/8 x 7 7/8 in 6 7 Executed in 1976, ‘Scultura n. 25’ was conceived in 1935, in the earliest years of Melotti’s sculptural practice, and belongs to a series of architectural sculptures executed in pure white. Segmented into three rectangular sections of varying dimensions, the upper right partition is divided by rippling vertical bands, evocative of the plucked strings of a musical instrument or the lines of a stave. Yet, the overall effect of the sculpture is the purity of absolute silence. In Germano Celant’s words, the sculptures of 1935 represent ‘a pause halfway between the seen and the unseen, the linear and the curved, the solid and the empty’. Unable to reconcile the purity of these first, dazzling works with the trauma of a world ravaged by human cruelty, in the years that followed their execution Melotti underwent a period of prolonged artistic silence that would last until his triumphant return to the art world in the 1960s. Melotti had his first exhibition at the Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1935. Rejecting traditional sculptural parameters of volume and form, the works exhibited were abstract, made from neutral white plaster or fine metal. These first works gave way to a series of sculptures that would occupy Melotti throughout 1935. Dematerialised and penetrable, these works incorporate the empty space that passes through them. Fusing the artist’s love of mathematics and music, they are both geometrically and rhythmically balanced; their rigorous proportions harmoniously combine straight and curved lines with concave and convex forms. Melotti observed, ‘We would consider these things not architectural elements, but as expressions of pure form, that is, as examples of the harmonious occupation of space’. Melotti’s catalogue essay from his first 1935 exhibition is crucial to an understanding of his artistic vision at this time. For him, abstract art, inherited from a long line of skilled architectural practitioners, was the purest of all formal problems. He wrote, ‘Form, harmony in space, doesn’t care about plaster, marble, or bronze. The way a Doric column fills space doesn’t change if we replace marble with disguised plaster. The love for material (sensuousness, naturalism) has nothing to do with art. Abstract art.’ Poised at the inception of his practice, balanced between geometry and poetry, silence and melody, ‘Scultura n. 25’ embodies the dualities that would come to define Melotti’s post-war oeuvre. 8 9 Le mani (The Hands) 1949 Painted terracotta, brass 35 x 29 x 9 cm / 13 3/4 x 11 3/8 x 3 1/2 in 10 11 A mature example of the Teatrini that occupied Fausto Melotti from as far back as the 1920s until the end of his career, ‘Le mani’ (1943) showcases the artist’s effortless synthesis of narrative abstraction and meticulous craftsmanship. Described by Melotti as his ‘Lieder’ – expressive compositions in the manner of the German Romantic tradition – the Teatrini impart metaphysical dramas played out on an intimate scale and are deliberately left open to a variety of interpretations. Creating a mysterious and enigmatic theatrical space, the narrative power of these work rests on a subtle balance between representation and abstraction, emotional and poetic tension, all of which solicits the imagination of the viewer. In ‘Le mani’, the open-front box modelled from mottled clay is painted in warm autumnal colours, evoking the sun-baked hues of a Mediterranean village. Inside is a scene in two acts: the hands in relief appear to be warming themselves over a fire, or perhaps they are enveloped in a soft, rich fabric; opposite, the hard metal face corrugates. The distance between the two parts that reverberates in the square vacuum, is expressed in a sensitive, balanced silence. Soliloquy as well as absorption are expressed in a metaphysical container, as in a page of Melotti’s poetry. 12 13 Con gli specchi (With Mirrors) 1979 Brass, clay, mirror 54 x 81 x 11.5 cm / 21 1/4 x 31 7/8 x 4 1/2 in 14 15 Segmented into eight panels arranged on two levels, ‘Con gli specchi (With Mirrors)’(1979), plays with a musical understanding of counterpoint. Melotti crafts a polyphonic narrative in which each chamber of the sculpture contains a different tableau corresponding to individual moments from a woman’s day. They are interspersed by intermissions indicated by diaphanous skeins of brass that hang in bands from the rungs of the sculpture. The first tableau of the series shows the figure in repose, her hair flowing freely behind her. Moving along the upper row, beyond the ascending ladder, a woman’s face gazes ahead into an elliptical mirror, which, from certain angles, becomes a musical note. On the lower row, a configuration of twisted lines evoke figures in conversation; arms raised in animation, they are reflected in a long, rectangular mirror. In the final tableau of the sequence, two figures crafted from parallel bars intersect, as though a happy couple coming together at the end of a long day. ‘Con gli specchi (With Mirrors)’ expresses the gaiety with which Melotti created sculpture, drawing upon the theatrical genius first documented in the Teatrini. Melotti left the Teatrini deliberately open to a variety of interpretations, but ‘Con gli specchi (With the mirrors)’ unfolds like the narrative of a play, each act divided by an interval that allows the audience to gather their thoughts. Unlike in the early Teatrini, Melotti’s later works play on human emotions, crafting relationships from mere twists and turns of delicate brass, expressing joy and sadness, hope and fear, love and loneliness, with the purity of silence.

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