The indispensable superfluous. The ceramics of Pietro Melandri

"Pietro Melandri is a true artist. Constantly new forms, marvelous decorations, polychrome enamels, harmonious contrasts come out of his imagination that never rests. He studies color and fire; fire has its own mysteries that he spies and wants to master. He will succeed. The field run by this young creator is now vast, true works of art come out of his kilns. And they will not be forgotten." Antonio Beltramelli, 1928

With the exhibition "The Indispensable Superfluous. The ceramics of Pietro Melandri(1885- 1976)", curated by Roberto Cobianchi, Galleria Brun Fine Art, in collaboration with Marco Arosio, presents for the first time, in the prestigious spaces of Via Gesù in Milan, a tribute to one of the great masters of 20th-century Italian ceramics, Pietro Melandri. 

If the 'precious art of ceramics' has by now been given its rightful place in the national artistic context, thanks to the Art Nouveau fantasies of Galileo Chini, the Deco elegance of Gio Ponti, the abstractions of Fausto Melotti and Lucio Fontana, and the neo-cubism of Leoncillo Leonardi, a special merit is reserved for Pietro Melandri from Faenza: he used ceramics with an absolute autonomy of artistic expression. 

Through the works, the exhibition retraces Melandri's creative phases, from the production of the Melandri & Focaccia company (1922-1933), to the more autonomous experimentation of his full maturity in the 1940s and 1950s, when the great technical skills that have always been recognised in him, especially in the rendering of metal lustres, were enriched by an imaginative world of figures and signs of naturalistic inspiration that reached, in the famous 'grotesques', such a metamorphosis with respect to the reference models as to be totally new and peculiar to his production. 

Initiated from childhood into the practice of that art with which the city of Faenza has lived in symbiosis for centuries, Melandri deepened his artistic culture by attending evening courses at the local Scuola d'Arti e Mestieri (School of Arts and Crafts) and artistic circles in Milan - where he lived from 1907 until the outbreak of the First World War -, so that the outcome of a training that was not exclusively workshop-based was that of an exceptional ceramist, interested in the art of the past and an insatiable 'consumer' of contemporary art.

Melandri's creative adventure did not remain confined to the highest craftsmanship, but became part of the cultural and artistic debate between the two wars, thanks to its great formal and technical qualities, and by virtue of a historical-critical conjuncture that in the first half of the twentieth century made ceramics a protagonist of exhibition activity and discussion around the applied arts. That of ceramics was a renaissance that was also intercepted by the Futurist avant-garde with the 1938 Manifesto of Ceramics and Aeroceramics, signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and ceramist Tullio d'Albisola.

A work such as the Mask of the Wind belongs to a series of sculptures that can rightly be considered among the pinnacles of Melandri's plastic work, in which the modelling is masterfully enriched by the quality of the glassy skin rich in iridescence and material effects. Melandri was not only an exquisite modeller of small plastic sculptures, sometimes close to divertissement such as Orpheus (c. 1935) or Nereid on a sea horse (c. 1942), but also excelled in the monumental scale, from the Modern Venus in the Museo Internazionale della Ceramica in Faenza, to the Virgin of the Assumption (1932) that Brun Fine Art Gallery will exhibit on this occasion.

Very special were then the numerous ceramic wall coverings intended for the decoration of public and private spaces, which originated from Melandri's collaboration with some of the most significant architects of the Italian 20th century, first and foremost Melchiorre Bega and Gio Ponti. Thanks to the cooperation between Brun Fine Art and Marco Arosio, one of the exceptional panels (330 x 122 cm average) that decorated the Caffè Irrera in Piazza Cairoli in Messina, which was radically renovated in 1953 by architect Filippo Rovigo, will be on display. This decoration is the most eccentric and astonishing of those destined by Melandri for architecture. In his fifteen panels, each composed of numerous irregularly shaped elements, the master defined the contours of the figures with a threadlike stroke - a red cord - that equals that of the drawing in its flow. For these figures of young women with their elongated proportions, unnatural features and extravagant clothing, Melandri did not draw on his more personal and well-established vocabulary of images - for example the splendid wall decoration of the bar in the Hotel Roma in Bologna, now in the MIC in Faenza - but rather referred to contemporary art: from Picasso's Gallo to Cubist still lifes, from Modigliani's proportions to the precise and sinuous forms of Matisse. Melandri immersed Cubist inspiration in a visionary and magical world that seems to reach from Alberto Martini to Leonor Fini. 

PIETRO MELANDRI
Curated by Roberto Cobianchi
4 April - 4 May 2024

Catalogue available curated by Roberto Cobianchi with an essay by Claudia Casali