Fausto Melotti's Little-Known Figurative Paintings on View in Milan

Galleria Christian Stein in Milan presents an unexpected side of Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 – Milan, 1986): a series of figurative paintings created around 1956, when the artist was about fifty. The works depict views of Zoagli, on the Ligurian coast, where Melotti spent summers in a house on Via Aurelia. These paintings, sometimes labeled 'chiarista,' were made after the traumas of war, which had deeply affected him. Melotti himself wrote at the time: 'I paint. In painting perhaps we still have a way to say something, a word that has not been pronounced with that accent. A private way, a sort of diary. In sculpture nothing more to do, to say, after what has already been said and done. It is dead, for now.' The exhibition also includes three three-dimensional works from the same period: a large polychrome ceramic, Cariatide (1950), originally commissioned by Gio Ponti for a cruise ship; a small biscuit terracotta from 1945; and an extraordinary lost-wax piece from 1950 depicting a pregnant Madonna, a rare iconography showing the influence of Medardo Rosso. The show runs at Galleria Christian Stein in Milan.