Lugano
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Fausto Melotti was born in Rovereto in 1901. In 1915, with the outbreak of the First World War, he moved to Florence, where he spent the most important formative period of his life, discovering and deepening his knowledge of the great masters of the Renaissance. He then continued his studies, moving permanently to Milan, which became his home. After graduating in piano, he took a degree in electrical engineering and graduated in sculpture from the Brerado Academy, where he learnt, above all, ‘the virtue of disustanziare la materia’. In short, the destiny of a Pythagorean dream realised in magically solidified music.
In May 1935 he held his first major exhibition at the ‘Il Milione’ gallery in Milan, where he exhibited completely abstract works, in a radical process of dematerialisation inspired by the invisibility of sound. Around the 1940s, during the extremely difficult war years, Melotti began to deepen his great love of ceramics, which he cultivated until his death in 1986.
A multifaceted, versatile Renaissance artist, Melotti is a great sculptor or ‘anti-sculptor’, a creator of anti-rhetorical and anti-monumental forms. But he was also a painter, a writer and a great modeller. Along with Lucio Fontana, Melotti was the greatest Italian ceramist of the 20th century, creating an extraordinary series of figures: stylised children, vases, cups, real and imaginary animals, in a variety of shapes, often very colourful. This exhibition, situated in the centre of Milan, his city, transmits a valuable synthesis and a joyful testimony of this specific artistic experience.
Text by Paolo Repetto