Fausto Melotti at Paolo Baldacci - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Looking back on his shift in the mid-1930s from figurative sculpture to abstract, often musically inspired work, Fausto Melotti recalled his "renunciation of the turbid pleasures of matter." Melotti's desire for an art of rationalist geometry ran up against the Second World War, and, at least temporarily, geometry lost. In 1940, the idealized figures and flowing drapery of his Allegory of the Four Arts at the Triennale in Milan indulged in the Italian Fascist taste for historical pastiche. He also executed large-scale marble pieces for EUR, Mussolini's model town near Rome. In 1943, Melotti's Milan studio was destroyed and for the rest of the 1940s he turned to small-scale ceramic works: bas reliefs in painted terra-cotta and what he termed Teatrini, terra-cotta sculptures that resemble miniature stage sets. The Teatrini, clearly influenced by Arturo Martini, presented schematic figures and objects in spare, enigmatic arrangements. In the 1950s, as the Italian recovery got under way, Melotti returned to a more visible role, executing numerous public and private commissions, including ceramic decorations for Gio Ponti's Villa Planchard in Caracas (1954) and a giant wall of 700 ceramic tiles in Turin in 1961.

The first three decades of Melotti's sculpture were almost completely absent from this exhibition--the first ever devoted to the artist in the U.S.--which concentrated on Melotti's work from the early '60s until his death in 1986. (Happily, examples of his earlier work could be seen at the Guggenheim's concurrent "Italian Metamorphosis" show.) The one exception was Coherence-Man (1936), a 7-foot-high plaster figure whose smooth surface was broken by the imprint of a hand at chest-level. While the rounded contours owe much to de Chirico's metaphysical mannequins, in the context of mid-'30s Italy it is also possible to see a figure giving a form of official salute.

During the last two decades of his life Melotti concentrated on small-scale metal sculptures, mostly in brass. This somewhat overcrowded show included more than 20 of these playful, evocative works in which, with the slenderest of means, Melotti achieved that great sculptural ambition of "drawing in space." He also returned, in the alternating visual rhythms of his "Theme and Variations" series (1968-86), to his early musical inspiration (occasionally using the nowadays rare sculptural material of gold). With a basic vocabulary of filaments, sheets and screens, Melotti navigated among geometric abstraction, schematic figuration and full-blown, if miniaturized, scenography like Subway at Christmas (1965). In Troubled Conscience (1973) he used curving brass filaments and a tiny mirror to create a strange willowy figure.

For those raised on Calder, Melotti's late work might appear static and finicky, but this comparison misses his achievement of making a definitive break with the corporeal or "turbid" past of Italian sculpture. Melotti's work also displays the restraint and radical economy of form that informed so much postwar Italian art. And if compare you must, in works like Hay Wagon (1979)--a fragile-looking brass wagon carrying upright sheaves of brass wheat--and Scherzo (1983)--where a thin brass wire delicately curves up almost two feet like a blossoming musical clef--Melotti excelled at his own brand of serious whimsy and melancholy motion.

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