FAUSTO MELOTTI
LA CERAMICA
LA CERAMICA
Lucca, Fondazione Ragghianti
March 25 – June 25, 2023
Exhibition views: Courtesy Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca
In collaboration with the Fondazione Fausto Melotti and the MIC – Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza
With the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca
Under the patronage of the Regione Toscana and the Provincia and Comune di Lucca
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi
Twenty years after the publication of the catalog raisonné of ceramics by Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 – Milan, 1986), the exhibition narrates and explores the production, wrongly considered to be minor, of one of the protagonists of the transformation of 20th-century Italian art.
The exhibition is divided into four sections.
The first section contextualizes Melotti’s ceramic output in his lifetime and throughout his activity, via an illustrated chronology ranging from his birth in 1901 to his passing in 1986. The timeline, which is illustrated by glass cases containing documents from his archive and specifically connected to his ceramicwork, includes three notebooks never exhibited before.
The second section is dedicated to the best-known types of ceramic sculptures conceived by the artist as such: from the sacred ceramics to the bas-reliefs, from the animals to “Korai,” from the so-called “Bambini” (children) to the “Teatrini” (little theaters). The precious “Lettera a Fontana” (1944), exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1950, is also on display.
In the third section the video In prima persona. Pittori e scultori. Fausto Melotti (1984), by Antonia Mulas, includes the only interview in which the artist, analyzing his own path and his conception of art, talks about ceramics.
Preceded by a focus on another of Melotti’s best-known typologies of ceramicworks – the vases, in their countless different forms – the fourth and final section of the exhibition brings together different types of ceramics-cups, bowls, lamps, plates, tiles. Works that, albeit inspired by everyday objects, the artist created by releasing them from their function and making them into real sculptures.
Alongside the works of Melotti, pieces by major artists and designers (from Giacomo Balla to Lucio Fontana, from Leoncillo to Arturo Martini, from Gio Ponti to Enzo Mari) with whom the artist had direct or indirect contact, are on display, offering us a portrait of Melotti rooted in his time.