Maddeningly and marvellously strange
Fausto Melotti: Counterpoint Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London N1 ★★★★★
At first sight, Fausto Melotti’s works have the look of inscrutable toys or pieces of spindly, distended jewellery rather than sculpture. That’s because sculpture has traditionally been about the balance of weight and mass, and this mid-20th-century Italian artist’s work has disconcertingly little of either. You could pick up most of the exhibition with one arm, and some of the pieces are 8ft high. Yet even the tallest, Sculpture C – Infinito
(1969), a steel rod with a quizzical curlicue at the top, has about it a kind of miniaturist fineness. Many feel oddly architectural, despite their almost painful slightness of form.
Revered in Italy but barely known in Britain, Melotti (1901-1986) qualified as an electrical engineer before switching to art and becoming part of the Paris-based Abstraction-creation group, which also included Mondrian, Kandinsky and Hepworth. Even so, trying to relate the works here to wider developments or even to any logical time-frame feels daunting. Not least because the works are shown in more or less reverse chronology, and the most recent look the oldest.
Harlequin’s Bride (1979), comprising two rag-doll figures – just curving brass rods with battered lumps of plaster for heads – in a wheeled cart, has a hint of surreal eroticism about it, as well as a whiff of the classical world. But how this work – or The Lion Friend (1960), a sad-faced stick creature with a pair of testiclelike spheres dangling from his rear end – relate to the smooth-contoured abstracted plaster figure looming over the centre of the room, the paltry wall texts give little clue.
Similarly, are the works in the second room, with their gravitydefying loops, ripples and coils of stainless steel, like so many bass and treble clefs gone haywire, intended to evoke the structures of counterpoint (as the publicity material suggests) or its sound? I dare say we’ll never know, though these exquisitely wrought works – and everything here is beautifully made – do create a kind of whirring, pinging clamour in the mind.
At times, the 3D collage feel of Melotti’s structures put you in mind of Anthony Caro, though Melotti’s paper-thin stainless steel surfaces make the British sculptor look positively leaden in comparison. And while the work in this part of the exhibition appears entirely abstract, the suspicion that the distended treble-clef figures on sheets of steel in Meriggio (Noon) (1975) may actually represent bathers on sunloungers, makes you wonder if there isn’t a mischievous sense of humour running through all of Melotti’s work. He may be maddeningly abstruse at times, but this exhibition is entrancing.