Fausto Melotti was born in 1901 and died in 1986. He was greatly influenced by Giotto, Simone Martini, Botticelli, Donatello and Michelangelo. He was a modernist but based his art upon Renaissance values, values which Modernism itself dismissed, broke and disassembled. The relationship between 20^th century modernity and the past, especially the Renaissance, always intrigued artists profoundly. In fact, all artists want to create or provoke a link with the heritage of the past.

After he graduated as an electrical engineer, Fausto Melotti turned towards a musical path. However, after a few years he felt inclined towards sculpture and the visual arts. There he began an interesting journey which I call "the poetics of materiality", an engaging response to the crude materiality of Duchamp and also those artists who insisted on art as being materiality in itself. For Melotti, materiality was poetry of harmony and artistic elegance. He found a lifetime companion in another giant of contemporary art, Lucio Fontana.

He used to strongly believe that art must be created by art itself, meaning that the artist must be constrained to use and exploit means and tools which belong to the sphere of art. This to him signified the autonomy of art. He also believed that artistic abilities consisted of the mental ability for independent thought. Together with Van Doesburg, Seuphor and Vantogerloo, he was part of the group which could be called the founder of the abstract art movement: Abstraction-Création. This movement was in fact born out of another which was called Circle and Square. All of them used to believe in formal purity in art and also that which is called 'non-objectivity', that one could create geometric abstraction without objects, and abstraction in any artistic activity.  

Like many artists who were searching for a new language, an art which could best reflect the reality of the time, Melotti 'usurped' the talent he had in the musical field. This is seen clearly in his work which instigated much debate at the site of the Milan Triennale. The work consisted of 12 sculptures placed in a way in which the regular intervals between each one are felt together with the interaction with colour, words and volume. The work was titled The Constant Man.

Ceramics were another important art form for Melotti. Together with Gio Ponti (who also taught the Maltese architect professor Richard England) he found fertile ground for more ambitious creations, amongst them Villa Planchart (Caracas, 1953-57) and Villa Nemazee (Tehran, 1960).

When I again saw my favourite work of his in front of 'Hangar Bicocca', I was reminded of an interesting yet contradictory idea: it seems that in the modern period in which we live, the metallic culture of the 20^th century is only an expression, a relationship and a reflection of the Renaissance era and its developments, which today in the 21^st century is regarded as Ancient. In other words, the 16^th-18^th centuries have become, for the 21^st century, Ancient Times.

Just as Italian art slowly emerged from the Gothic period and had to look back to Ancient Greece to find a new language for a new era (that which we today call the Renaissance), today art has to look back to the Renaissance years in the same way. So just as Michelangelo returned to Greek art to create his masterpieces, today we also look back in time, to the Renaissance, to maybe give birth to a new language.

Obviously, Michelangelo had to look further than 1000 years away. We have to look to a much closer and shorter period. Yet artists today are also searching even farther than Michelangelo did, towards the prehistoric 'vision of the world'.

In the 15^th century artists returned to the Greeks, and the 21^st century is looking at the 20^th, yet with a prehistoric lens. Meaning that we are looking at the modern to go back to prehistory, not to turn the clocks back but to build a modern prehistory. To begin from the beginning once again.

We look back to a time when man began to realise he possessed the strength to create something. Back to the moment before conscious creativity. Back to the moment when he realized that he could paint, meaning when he realized that he had the capacity to represent something in an objective manner, which he could communicate through art.

Picasso, Matisse, Tatlin, Antoine Camilleri, Josef Kalleya and, today, Victor Agius and, modestly, myself, in contemporary works, are revisiting these roots of prehistoric consciousness.

We are back to where we started. And Melotti, amongst others, is showing precisely this return. The return to the beginning of man as an active participant in the creation of the universe. A return to the beginning yet with the machinery of the present.

Melotti is here showing a metallic 'Ħaġar Qim', and this way he is reminding us that the future is nothing but the present which emerges from the past.

The 20^th century is a direct and epic heir of Enlightenment thought with all its paradoxes. Thought which believes that a reasoning human being, a being with thought, calculation, and with scientific and empirical study, could arrive at some sort of absolute truth which could help man become god over nature and the universe. Man succeeded in creating the Tower of Babel and in stopping the sun in her approach.

Francis Bacon, David Hume, Newton and Voltaire, with their constant revolutionary search, created a radically new world based upon dictatorial science and which led to the violent and even suicidal occupation of every space possible by man, not only of the whole planet but also of the entire universe. A time which won the battle against the monopolization of thought which previously permitted the establishment of religions and churches.

Upon empirical and scientific principles, however, was born a child who believed that due to science one could also regulate, create and make possible a new man with new thoughts.

Could man use the same empirical and scientific facts to create and determine a new society with new men and a new human species, the Superman, the Uber-marionette, man who could stop the sun from progressing with her daily journey, man who could produce new animals, new genetics, new monsters; Frankenstein?

These ideas did not remain in the narrative pages of a Victorian novel but became a reality which impresses yet shocks one profoundly. A period of total confusion when not even the seasons make sense as we have also gained control over climate.

And because of these monsters we require a new art, and Melotti presents us with his Ħaġar Qim. A sacred megalithic metallic temple, which is just as majestic as Ħaġar Qim.

A confrontation between stone and metal. Have we arrived at a crossroads?

 

Article edited and translated by Nikki Petroni

Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci is the artistic director of the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale which will be held between 13 November 2015 and 7 January 2016. APS is the main partner of the Mdina Biennale