Salvatore Melani Biography
Fernando Melani (1907 – 1985) was an artist from Pistoia and a cosmopolitan scientific researcher. Starting from reflections on matter and the atom, he carried out creative research close to currents such as Arte Povera, Conceptual Art and Minimal Art, in some cases anticipating their outcomes. Many of his works today find accommodation in the Fernando Melani house-studio in Pistoia. After attending the Forteguerri high school in Pistoia, Fernando Melani interrupted his studies in 1924. After the Second World War, as a member of the Communist Party (PCI), he decided to wear a blue worker's overalls every day, giving the party a part of his house in Corso Gramsci in exchange for an annuity. The rest of the house was transformed into a home-studio, which was then purchased in 1987 by the Municipality of Pistoia which opened a house-museum there. His artistic activity began in 1945, after a period of work at his father's brickyard; he trained alongside the Pistoia painter Alfiero Cappellini who introduced him to Giorgio Morandi. The first paintings, although figurative, already demonstrate a synthetic-abstract attention which was made explicit in 1953 in his pamphlet dedicated to abstraction "Davanti alla Pittura". Since 1950 he has worked on wooden compositions, balanced between painting and sculpture, designed to be placed in space; three years later, Fiamma Vigo included him among the artists of the Galleria Numero team in Florence. At the end of the decade he began working with metals, creating works, entitled "Experiences", made up of sheets of metal, foil, nails and copper wires. Carla Lonzi dedicated a documentary to him in the RAI "Le tre arti" section, and introduced his solo show in 1967 at the Milanese headquarters of the Galleria Numero, introducing him to Luciano Fabro, with whom he exhibited in 1980, together with Renato Ranaldi, at the Vera Biondi Gallery in Florence. In 1972 he presented his work at Documenta 5 in Kassel; two years later, the Galleria Borgogna in Milan published his portfolio "Arcobaleno 1", inspired by Marcel Duchamp's "Boîte en valise". He died in Pistoia on 28 March 1985.
