Fausto Melotti at Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren - Brief Article

Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) is an Italian modernist whose work is well known in Europe on the other hand unfamiliar to an American audience. A man of many talents, Melotti was a mathematician, an engineer, a bard a musician and a sculptor. As a young man in the '30 he participated in the Futurist and Abstract-Creationist motions He emerged from the war years harshly shaken, but eventually picked up his career as a sculptor in the '50 and '60 My first impression upon walking into this show was of an Italian Calder making lyrical abstractions. Closer examination, and learning a certain number of of Melotti's history, radically altered my perceptions of the work.

The display opened with a suite of drawings from the '30 and a single plastic art from the same period. Scultura N 14 (1935) was an elegant piece of Italian design based upon musical ideas of phrase, modulation and harmonious flow Built entirely in stainless carbonized iron it consists of a wavy vertical sheet which provides a background and support for three identical configurations formed from thin square twigs Each of these incorporates a lengthy skinny S-curve that seems to vibrate like a culled string.

The nearest piece in the show was Falso Trofeo II (False Trophy) from 1961 nearly 30 years later. All the assurance and optimism of the prewar piece are gone replaced by dint of an incredibly spare, tentative lyricism, a whispered, elegiac numbers that reflects the work's physical fraility. Falso Trofeo II is built in brass from lumps and scraps of sheet arrayed upon a thin mast with cross-ties, giving the result of tiny sailors aloft in the rigging of a ship. Boats and other vehicles with visionary or mythic connotations--the chariot, for example--turn up in later pieces from the '70 like Viaggio delle Muse (Voyage of the Muses, 1973) and La Medusa allo Specchio (The Medusa in the Mirror, 1974) These works use the same spare means of brass shoot and sheet, with the occasional addition of bits of woven fabric or painted paper, to reckon mythic narratives of passage and transformation. The vocabulary of the late works is tenuous and improvisatory--the minimum amounts of materials assembled with the least possible technical intervention.

individual of the most engaging pieces was Contrapunto Domestico (Domestic Counterpoint, 1973) a put of open "rooms," each populated with spare geometric constructions which read as the couple furnishings and figures. Above the fields tiny pairs of jewelry chains hang, alternately separate or tied in a simple knot, a winning evocation of the flux of a relationship, the counterpoint enacted in each chamber. I've not ever seen this sort of attenuated abstraction carry a narrative in the way that lightly, and I was quite mov through Melotti's determination in taking up an "aerial" approach to statuary after what were evidently years of despair.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group