Contemporary Drawing by Fausto Melotti Painting Pencil on Paper Frame - Sculpture project

Tempera, pencil and charcoal on paper. Signed on the back. The drawing is registered in the Archive Fausto Melotti with code DIS 84020. Fausto Melotti was a multifaceted and very prolific artist and it is almost impossible to link his production to a particular technique or theme, without providing only a partial view of his artistic vision. The salient features that are constant in Melotti are geometry, the study of abstraction, which leads him to use realistic but not scientifically accurate elements, and arranging the elements so that they recall a musical rhythm, a detail that refers to his training as a musician Sculptor, painter, musician, poet, he made numerous design drawings for his works. Drawing represented for him a fundamental exercise, to transfuse the original graphic trait from sheets of paper into sculptures and ceramics. The sculptures for which he is best known are made up of geometric elements made with metals (brass, iron and gold) worked into thin filaments, giving life to ethereal, weightless and almost fragile compositions. The work is presented in a frame.

Pencil on paper. Signed on the back. The drawing is registered in the Fausto Melotti Archive, with code DIS 72006. Fausto Melotti was a multifaceted and very prolific artist and it is almost impossible to link his production to a particular technique or theme, without providing only a partial view of his vision artistic. The salient features that are constant in Melotti are geometry, the study of abstraction, which leads him to use realistic but not scientifically accurate elements, and arranging the elements so that they recall a musical rhythm, a detail that refers to his training as a musician Sculptor, painter, musician, poet, he made numerous design drawings for his works. Drawing represented for him a fundamental exercise, to transfuse the original graphic trait from sheets of paper into sculptures and ceramics. The sculptures for which he is best known are made up of geometric elements made with metals (brass, iron and gold) worked into thin filaments, giving life to ethereal, weightless and almost fragile compositions. The work is presented in a frame.

Tarasp Castle 1960

Oil on cardboard. Signed and dated lower right. The Roman artist Cesare Maggi established himself as a landscape painter of the divisionist style, portraying Alpine landscapes of the Engadine and Aosta Valley, often enlivened by the inclusion of figures and animals. Having become friends with the painter Giacomo Grosso in Turin in 1901, he then successfully turned to the portrait genre, setting aside the divisionist technique. Although he still preferred high mountain views, he expanded his subjects by also working on marine and still life paintings. Shown here is the snow-covered glimpse of Tarasp Castle, an 11th-century fortress in Lower Engadine, Switzerland. This is a late work by the artist, who remained attached to his favorite subject, the Alpine landscape, until the end, despite having now abandoned the divisionist technique of his early period. The work is presented in a period frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Unsigned, there is a label on the back with attribution to Ferdinand II Wagner (1847 -1927), a German painter appreciated for his decorative painting. The large painting offers, according to an ancient taste, a glimpse of a city market in a Nordic village, with figures in 17th century Flemish clothes. The central part is occupied by a stall full of fruit and vegetables: on the left the seller, sitting with the steelyard hanging above her, is bargaining with the couple of buyers on the right, intent on testing the quality of the products. The painting is presented in a period frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Signed Bertolotti lower right. It offers a glimpse of a forest, with sparse, tall plants and an undergrowth full of rocks covered by a green lawn; through the trees, a gash opens up in the center, flooded with light, framing rugged mountain peaks. The painting, with a strong scenographic impact, is presented in a contemporary frame.

Suspension Study 1992

Mixed media on paper. Title but readable at the bottom; on the back the artist's stamp with signature, date and title (Pour poissons - Studio sospeso). Caccioni, an artist who was born, trained and still lives in Bologna, is one of the protagonists of a generation that has now reached a definitive linguistic maturity and occupies a prominent space within the contemporary artistic panorama. His research mainly uses unusual materials such as acetates, PVC and, more recently, stage backdrops of nineteenth-century theatrical works, on which he intervenes by painting shapes drawn from a personal memory and from suggestions coming from different cultures and historical periods. A recurring element in Luca Caccioni's work is writing, a self-signifying sign that designs the work and is capable of recounting thoughts; working by superimposition, the images are constructed by adding or subtracting color on the various supports. Work in frame.

Vis à Vis 1963

Mixed media (marker, watercolor) on paper. signed and dated lower right. Jean Cocteau was a multifaceted artist: writer, playwright, playwright, he also dabbled in visual arts, loving to experiment with all the avant-gardes of his century. Cocteau published his first book of drawings in 1923, at just 36 years old. In it the poet portrayed his friends Raymond Radiguet, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, but also numerous scenes of daily life in Paris, Nijinski's Russian ballets, allegories, caricatures, poetic images. Cocteau revealed himself to be a talented sketcher, but above all an artist capable of capturing the essence of faces, behaviors, human weaknesses. The theme of the face, or rather of faces, often two profiles facing each other, vis à vis, recurs in his pictorial production. In 1962 the artist completed the construction of the open-air theatre in Cap d'Ail, on the French Mediterranean coast, whose flooring is decorated with this subject, two faces with a Greek profile facing each other, with an eye in between; the subject was then re-proposed by him in the following period - moreover the one imminent to his sudden death -, with different variations. In the drawing presented here we find the two Greek profiles, separated by the third eye but also by two twisted snakes, while in the drawing of the theatre we find leaves. The work is presented in a frame.

The Angel of Death 1979

Oil on hardboard. Signed and dated lower left. Further signature, date and title on the back. Angelo Peratici's artistic production is characterized by a desire for expressive freedom that draws on his fervent imagination to represent reality. Starting from this innate impulse to transfigure reality, his art has transformed into a laborious research process, fertile with metaphorical and visionary images, sometimes grotesque, eccentric, which we see realized in particular in the production of the early 80s.

Untitled

Oil on linoleum, with applications in polystyrene covered with foil. Signed on the back. Accompanied by authentication from the Aldo Mondino Archive. The eclectic Turin artist Aldo Mondino has articulated his artistic research through continuous metamorphoses that have made his production polymorphic: an incessant attempt to find a personal response to the transformations that were taking place in the Seventies, trying to make the history of art coexist with images of mass consumption, personal fantasies, religion, classicism, mysticism, travels to the East, friends and kitsch. His obstinate need to experiment with materials – such as coffee, sweets, sugar, chocolate castings from his beloved Piedmont, marshmallows imported from America, bronze, flowers, strictly blue Bic pens, ceramics and Heraclite carpets – demonstrates his ability to make art, craftsmanship, common life, nature and religion dialogue. All seasoned with the use of irony, to unmask conventions with grace. In the 1980s Aldo Mondino undertook a journey between Morocco and Palestine that left a real mark on him, so much so that it generated the series of works of the Dervishes, dancing subjects painted on linoleum, who practice the ritual dance characteristic of the Turkish tradition by performing fluid and circular movements. The work is presented in a frame.

Duck Flight

Bronze sculpture. Signature engraved on the base. Gino Masciarelli, a sculptor originally from Abruzzo but who lived in the Milan area, after having also worked at the Experimental Center for Scientific Research “F. Marinotti” in Lombardy, dealing with high-frequency cinematographic shooting, learned to capture the instability of bodies in movement and the dissolution of matter in space in many of his works. In the sculptures "Human groups" and "Flight" - to which the work presented here belongs -, the dynamism of flight can be observed almost as if it were a photographic sequence. The artist himself said: "Only 8 seconds made an impression on 300 meters of film, the aim was to slow down what the human eye cannot see, I wanted to capture the movement and the projection of these seconds lasted a couple of hours".

Sunny Landscape

Fresco on canvas. Signed lower right. Further signature and technique on the back. Placed in the informal Emilian naturalism, Bruno Saetti's painting is distinguished by a significant love for the pictorial material, rich and consistent, pasty and fermenting, but also open to the modulations of luminous vibration. His series of "frescoes" with the Sun as the dominant subject is rich, as in this work, which presents a large bright sun shining on a brick red background, above an indefinite landscape, where only a basilica can be recognized at the top right. If Saetti's Emilian origin is evident in the warm tones of the red bricks and in the very peculiar taste of the material (the favorite fresco), on the other hand the Venetian contamination is recognizable (Saetti lived for a long time in Venice) in his lingering on the color, on its luminous vibrations, on the feeling of astonished amazement of space. The work is presented in a frame.

The Woodcutter 1980

Oil on glass. On the lower left are the signature and date, accompanied by the artist's symbol, the stylised figurine of a man in a wheelchair. This is a work on glass by the painter Mario Previ, who has lived and painted in a wheelchair since the age of eighteen, due to quadriplegia following a plunge into his Taro river. He said of himself: ‘The world, the passage of time, from this point of view (the wheelchair) teaches you many things. You learn to wake up every morning with a purpose, even if your body is in pain, if every gesture generates suffering and you depend on others, and giving up could be an easy solution. And instead, art, painting, together with the serenity of my world, of friends, give me incredible energy. They have saved me, giving me the strength to live'. In 1974, three years after the accident, inspired by a television programme on Yugoslavian naïve painters, in particular by the works on glass by Mijo Kovacic, Previ began painting and learning the art of glass painting as a self-taught artist, until he became known and appreciated for his paintings. In his naifs, Mario Previ recounts a reality that has almost disappeared, real stories albeit in a fairy-tale tone, revives lost traditions, glimpses of life that belonged to other generations, those of the peasant civilisation (from which he comes), but what emerges most from his visions are the ‘forë’, those that could once be heard in the ‘firossi’, the traditional evenings in the hamlets of Parma dedicated to getting together to tell anecdotes, stories and historical curiosities, often in front of the fireplace, when it was cold and snowing outside. The work is presented in the frame.