Lugano
κένωσις – Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti was the exhibition that inaugurated Repetto Gallery’s new space in Lugano, at Via Clemente Maraini 24, in October 2022. It brought together two of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century, Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti, who were also close friends.
The title comes from the Greek kénosis, “emptying” (from kenós, “empty”): renunciation, reduction and transparency, the ideas at the heart of both artists’ work. In Fontana, this radical essentiality emerges from the late 1940s in his Spatial Environments and his celebrated holes and cuts. In Melotti, it takes the form of weightless “sculptures of air”, unfolding horizontally like an ancient frieze. As Melotti wrote, Fontana’s cut was “the emblematic need to get out of the informal jungle”.
The exhibition included Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (1960 and 1962) and a rare gold Taglio (1960), alongside paintings on plaster, ceramics, works on paper and eight major unique sculptures by Melotti from the 1970s and 1980s, including Nel futuro (1977), La creazione del mondo (1978), L’uscita delle Valchirie (1980) and Tema e variazioni XI(1981).