Fausto Melotti at Leo Castelli

Italian modernist Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) is known primarily for the abstract sculptures he began creating in the 1930s. These elegantly diminutive, finely wrought sculptures employ curved, flat and linear shapes that perch upon thin metal rods. Sometimes only barely asserting their identity as material objects, they dispense with not only the monumentality but even the volumetric quality of traditional sculpture. A similar sensibility--elusive, delicate and refined--emerged in this show of 32 of Melotti's drawings and watercolors. Dating from the 1950s through the early '70s, they come from the Melotti family and have rarely been shown before.

Most of the works (all untitled) combine abstract forms and loosely figurative motifs that can evoke the sea, massive stone architecture or Classical mythology. In one watercolor, for example, a series of thickly painted horizontal red and white bars float above an insubstantial, thinly washed pylonlike form at the edge of a cliff. In another, a red ornamental "A" floats between sea and sky in a soft, multihued composition that includes a series of colored bars at the edge. A third work features colored, soft-edged rectangles stacked on one another like building blocks of some archaic temple; upon them hovers, as if an alien spaceship, a pencil-drawn ellipsoid on thin, projecting legs or tethers.

Among the more representational works was one of a woman sitting on a massive stone composed of pasted-on variegated paper. She is shown in profile and painted in a rainbow spectrum. Her long, thick hair, which is rendered with rubbed graphite, expands as it falls like water to the image's edge; she might almost be personifying a natural force. In another enigmatic work, a giant animal-like form--drawn in simple white tubular lines, with gold rings serving for the creature's feet and head--appears to enter the shallow water of a grotto. Although works such as these seem at first to embody a kind of narrative, the ultimate effect is less specific, more about registering a mood or state of being, metaphysical, mythological or divine. In some of these delicate drawings, such as one that shows a collection of simple green and red triangles suspended like kites in the sky, the composition is completely abstract, a vision of twittering markings in a light and open space.

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