15 from January to February 28 2018, the Galleria Tonelli in Milan (via Aurelio Saffi 33 at the corner with Corso Magenta) hosts the exhibition FAUSTO MELOTTI. ABOUT THE DRAWING Starting from the drawings found for “Linee”
The exhibition presents twenty drawings, seventeen of which made by the artist to accompany the publication of the two notebooks of “Linee” (1975) and “Linee secondo quaderno” (1978), never exhibited together before and datable to the early Seventies, one of most fruitful periods of the Trentino artist.
The exhibition itinerary is also enriched by about twenty sculptures and ceramics, such as the Sun vase of 1950, i Kids of 1953, the pony from 1960, The Great Piano counterpoint, in the unique version, from 1973, one of the artist's most famous and important works, or vases, bowls and other ceramics from the fifties/sixties.
The opportunity to focus attention on the design of Fausto Melotti is given by the very recent acquisition of a very homogeneous group of drawings: of the twenty exhibited, no less than seventeen were used to accompany the publication of the two notebooks of "Linee" (respectively in 1975 and 1978) for the Adelphi publishing house. They are collections of acute, pungent, lyrical and sometimes bitter aphorisms that the artist had wanted to collect concisely after forty years of work, and on the eve of the last, most happy season of activity.
In this context of renewed creativity, the practice of drawing – like graphics – becomes fundamental: not all of them are sculpture projects, but they all possess that particular atmosphere of subtle narrativity, and stylistically they are linked to pre-war drawings, much more than the sculptures of the seventies and eighties cannot be traced back to those of the thirties.
In this regard, in agreement with the curator Marco Meneguzzo, the Tonelli Gallery intended to provide collectors, scholars and enthusiasts with a historical-critical tool, based on the analytical study of this group of drawings, which has taken the form of a large volume, systematic in some respects, on Melotti's drawing, and on the methods of comparison between drawings and sculptures, looking for themes and styles both common and peculiar to drawing and sculpture.
The result is a bilingual volume (Italian-English) published by Silvana Editoriale, of over one hundred and fifty pages: a long introductory essay by the curator on the practice of drawing, precedes the single large files – again edited by Meneguzzo – which show apparent recurring themes and Melotti's poetics, through the visual juxtaposition of drawings and sculptures conceptually close to those on display; a "narrated" biography edited by the art historian Sarah Boglino and a bibliography complete the volume.
