κένωσις - Lucio Fontana / Fausto Melotti

Repetto Gallery is delighted to announce the inauguration of its new headquarters in Lugano, with this KENOSIS exhibition dedicated to two of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century: Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti.

Kenosis: emptying; kenós (emptiness): as renunciation, reduction and transparency, these are key terms by which to indicate the very heart of their poetics. Lucio Fontana (Rosario, Argentina, 1899 – Comabbio, Varese, 1968) and Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 – Milan, 1986). The exhibition presents a confrontation, a dialogue between two great artists who were also friends, showcasing their elective affinity in freeing art from matter, in making it ever more essential, lyrical and luminous. In breaking out of “our shell, our physical cortex.”

Concetto spaziale

1957
Graffiti, holes, ink and aniline on paper on canvas
65 x 80 cm

Sulamita

1978
Brass and fabric
78 x 34 x 30 cm

Concetto Spaziale (Teatrino)

1966
Water-based paint on canvas and enamelled wood
100 x 100 cm

In Fontana’s work, in his splendid spatial environments and his famous cuts and holes, starting from the late 1940s, a clear, clean, radical essentiality in deep and minimal gestures very much espoused Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s favourite motto: Less is more. His fortunate, elegant reduction conquers more space and higher light. In the very clear-minded words of Melotti, “Fontana’s ‘cut’ is the emblematic need to get out of the informal jungle.”

Tema e Variazioni XI

1981 (1984)
Brass
65 x 148 x 31 cm

Concetto Spaziale, Attese

1960
Oil on canvas
70 x 50 cm

Untitled

Untitled
1979 ca.
Plaster and brass
50 x 65 cm

Denominatore

1970
Brass, painted fabric, plastic and bronze
75 x 60 x 35 cm

In Melotti, the same reduction, grace and transparency may be found in a less vertical but more horizontal declination: the ideal horizontality of the ancient frieze, freely taken up in the new and diverse metopes of the story, of the narrative, of the archaic and classical myth.