Repetto Gallery will host from the 25th of September until the 6th of November the exhibition FAUSTO MELOTTI The necessary Angel, a deep retrospective which presents the genius of Fausto Melotti as a complete and eclectic artist, sculptor, ceramist and writer. The exhibition is composed of 15 sculptures, 20 pieces of work on paper, a selection of his ceramics created in the mid 50’s, 3 paintings on plaster from the 70’s, and a selection of his scripts, which will be published in the catalogue.
The exhibition narrates the highest sense of Melotti’s art: his works, free of the weight of matter and monumentality, become a free flight of transparent levels, of invisible shapes, a delicate transfiguration of aerial curves and luminous volumes. Starting with a selection of his scripts, the figure of an angel has been identified as the symbol of the unification of the human and the divine, flesh and spirit, earth and sky. Melotti’s art in its entirety, may be considered a creative ascensional process, where the liturgy of creation goes from beneath to beyond, from matter to light, from weight to lightness, from visible to invisible.
Fausto Melotti, a Christian and an artist believer, was convinced that “the distance between man and God cannot be infinite. Otherwise we would really be abandoned beasts.” He was persuaded, as his admirable work testimonies, that when “mastery is beyond boundaries, the natural event becomes supernatural”, and the space and time enigma becomes light “at the first flight of the soul”. As Meister Eckhart, he knew that “When God sends his angel to the soul, it is when the latter starts to discover.” But what knowledge? The knowledge of art, following the  descentional procedure, the opposite to that of convention, working from the idea to the thing, from thought to object.

Biography
Fausto Melotti was born in Rovereto in 1901. His cousin, Carlo Belli was an abstractionist Italian theorist; Melotti was an engineer. He attended sculpture courses given by Adolfo Wildt at the Academy of Brera, with Fontana in 1930. In 1935 he adhered explicitly to the Milan abstraction movement and participated in the first collective exhibition of abstract art in Casorati and Paulucci’s studio in Torino, also exposing his sculptures of contrapuntal inspiration at the Galleria del Milione. After the pre-war period, the artist moved from geometrical abstraction to monumental sculpture using very different materials: plaster, brass, copper, bronze and steel. From the mid 40’s there is the series of the Teatrini,  in coloured terracotta. In the 60’s, after 10 years of ceramics and paintings on paper and canvas, he dedicated himself to brass string sculptures, light and diaphanous, with fragments of cloth or terracotta. In 1974 Adelphi published Linee (Lines), a collection of writings and poems by Melotti, followed by Linee secondo quaderno (Lines: a second notebook) in 1978. In the same year he won the Feltrinelli Award for Sculpture. In 1979 at the Palazzo Reale of Milano an anthology was presented. In 1983 he exhibited his works at the Modern Art National Gallery of Rome;  and again in 1985 at the Academy Gallery of Venice, Venezia; and in 1986 a review of his work was presented at the Venice Biennal. There then followed personal and collective exhibitions in Italy and abroad: New York, London, Zurich, Wien, Frankfurt, Munich, and in Paris at the Centre George Pompidou, in the great international exhibition entitled “Qu'est ce-que la sculpture moderne?. He died in Milan in 1986.