A train that runs and whistles like a comet: Fausto Melotti's Christmas Metrò

There is a train stopped at a subway station, we see it from the front. We can make out a figure inside the convoy, perhaps that of the driver. The crush typical of the days leading up to Christmas swarms the platform. Above the locomotive we notice a star, a comet shining not in the sky but on the subway tracks. It is an image that Melotti had fixed in his little sheets of notes and reflections, guarded with supreme care and then flowing into Lines, that sort of zibaldone of scattered thoughts published in 1981 by Adelphi. One quatrain, “The subway at Christmas / Whistles like a comet. / On the stairs the cold the fog the snow / They jostle each other.” It is the same image that appears in the finale of Giosuè Calaciura’s 2018 novel, when the poor outcasts who frequent the terminus of a streetcar on the outskirts of a large metropolis see the vehicle running on Christmas night, see its mass disappear in the dark, see the sparks that the pantograph leaves during the ride: “it seemed to everyone like a comet.”

In the Sicilian writer’s novella, what transforms the streetcar into a comet is the mysticism that pervades the nativity scene of the last, in Melotti’s work the miracle is possible thanks to poetry. His Christmas Metrò, a 1965 brass sculpture that dilutes and slows down a subject typical of the futurist poetics to which the artist had approached as a young man, is an image of the everyday that becomes poetry, it is the ordinary that becomes lyrical through Melotti’s lightness and imagination.

Fantasy is in continuous service, in Fausto Melotti’s universe: so wrote Giorgio Zampa in the preface to Lines. And that fantasy “appears everywhere, lightning-fast and unpredictable,” as the Trentino artist’s apparitions appear and dissolve “in a Euclidean dimension, governed by calculation, rhythm, measure, under the icy splendor of the Cipher.” This is how one can summarize the art of this singular electrical engineer born in Rovereto, who fell in love with the Florentine Renaissance from the time he finished high school in the Tuscan capital as a boy, and then became a student of Wildt at the Brera Academy. His art is “angelic geometric,” as he called it in the text he prepared for the catalog of his first solo exhibition, held at the Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1935. It is almost unicum in mid-20th-century Italian art: few others (the name of Osvaldo Licini comes to mind, for example) succeeded in that union of poetry and abstraction through sign that makes Melotti’s art possible. It is union of esprit de géometrie and esprit de finesse that generates music, to exhume the formula that Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, resorting to Pascal, used to define Melotti’s work in a survey of Italianabstract art published in 1986. It is poetry that marries music and it is in turn poetic feeling that marries sculpture, paraphrasing a note of his: the life of the arts, according to Melotti, lies in their marriage. And celebrating this marriage is geometric rigor, it is order, it is harmony.

Fausto Melotti, Christmas Metrò (1965; brass, 82 x 53 x 32 cm; Private Collection © Fausto Melotti Foundation)

Order governs the Christmas Metrò as well, although it is a different order than that of the more abstract works: the sculpture dates from a period when Melotti had already experimented with his rigors of counterpoint and harmonies, the dematerialization of figures, his abstraction of forms to juxtapose with the explorations of the Spatialists, the little theaters mindful of Metaphysics. In the Christmas Metrò he substantiates that rapprochement to figuration that returns often in his production of the 1960s, a time when his activity had experienced a new start after a twenty-year period devoted almost exclusively to ceramic production. And the work is reminiscent of his little theaters of twenty years earlier, those boxes that evoked inhabited interiors, with the same suspended atmospheres of the metaphysical painters, but devoid of their restlessness and anguish. Even the Christmas Metro is a kind of little box where the relative observes a piece of ordinary reality. Three vertical slabs and one horizontal one are enough to create a station, with the walls, the pillars, the platform. A fourth slab, perpendicular to the station wall, and with a convex top and an opening in the middle, is the train. A group of threadlike rods ending in irregular spheres, all different as if they were meant to be descriptions of individual personalities and individual characters, are the people crowding the platform. Some of these little figures, vaguely reminiscent of Giacometti’s characters, have a cone on their heads: a hat, in other words. They are like notes dictating the rhythm on the score. The comet hangs above the silhouette of the train with a pair of chains: they are the same ones that hang from the wall next to it, inserted by Melotti in order to evoke, by synaesthesia, sound sensations, to suggest the rattling of the convoy, as a further seal of the marriage between different art forms.

The Christmas Metrò is a sign sculpture, a work in which form is dematerialized into a musical synthesis; it is “modulation” rather than “modeling.” For Melotti, the equivalence was clear: modeling comes from the model, the model is inspired by nature, nature is disorder. Modulation comes from the module, the module is an expression of a canon, and therefore it is order. He explained this in the introduction to his 1935 exhibition, but it is an implication that applies to all his sculpture. And the sign is what “makes the painting figurative,” Melotti wrote in his leaflets. It is not to figuration that this task falls, because art “does not represent, but transfigures reality into symbols.”

And so one will take advantage of these Christmas holidays to board Melotti’s subway and begin a journey: after all, “the work of art is a journey,” the artist said. It does not matter where it will lead, and it does not matter if, as Calvino, a friend of Melotti’s, anticipated, at the end of the journey one will not arrive “to contemplate the extreme essences, the ideograms of an absolute alphabet.” What matters is that the work is a free journey, which offers itself, Melotti wrote, “even to the poorest of men,” and which will take us “to unknown regions so much more beautiful than the most pleasant on earth.” It may not necessarily be an easy journey, it may not necessarily be a challenging one: it almost never is. And so, so that one does not run the risk of missing something, so that during the journey one does not stay with one’s eyes closed all the time, it will be convenient to read the “program” carefully. It may be that reading costs effort, but reading will be the energy that will light up the wagons, that will brighten the view, that will prevent us from facing the journey in the dark.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.