“I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.”
—Lucio Fontana

Delicate yet muscular, violent but quietly meditative, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese commands remarkable visual power, its five precise vertical slashes seeming to flex and dance against the luminous green ground. Uniting real and imagined space for the first time, in his ‘cuts’ or Tagli Fontana radically disrupted centuries of pictorial tradition, rejecting both the illusionism of traditional painting and modernism’s veneration of the flat surface. The supreme embodiment of his Spatialist project, in piercing the canvas Fontana pushed beyond the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane into a fourth-dimension uniting space, time, colour, and movement. At once restrained and bursting with a concentrated, violent energy, the five perfectly balanced incisions record the confidence and mastery of the artist, capturing the rhythmic dance of his hand as it moved precisely across the surface of the canvas. Created in 1967, the present work was first owned by the Galerie Pierre in Stockholm, where an exhibition of Fontana’s works was mounted in the same year to correspond with a major retrospective at the city’s Moderna Museet and is highly representative of the artist’s international acclaim at this mature stage of his career.

 

Fontana at the Cutting Edge

Executed just one year before the artist’s death, Concetto spaziale, Attese represents the mature expression of Fontana’s radical aesthetic that evolved from the staccato perforations of his Buchi to the elegant precision of the Tagli works, first introduced towards the end of 1958. These tentative, early slashes quickly resolved into the precise, clean cuts that we see here, the fleeting action of a moment suspended in time captured in the work’s compositional rhythms and alluded to more indirectly in the ‘waiting’ of the title. Backing the canvas with black gauze to create the appearance of a deep void beyond, Fontana realised the ambitions laid out in his First Spatialist Manifesto from 1947 to ‘unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal’, moving decisively beyond the monochromatic and two-dimensional surface of the canvas into the infinite and ever-expanding space beyond the confines of the picture plane.^’i

“My cuts are above all a philosophical statement, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future”.
—Lucio Fontana

This fascination with the philosophical and technological implications of rapid advancements in scientific thought through the early decades of the 20th century aligned Fontana with the avant-garde ZERO movement, whose artists shared in the same utopian enthusiasm at the dawn of the Space Age. Just ten years before the execution of the present work, Sputnik had been launched into space, film and television were deeply preoccupied with images of space exploration and imagining the worlds that could exist beyond our own, and by 1969 the televised Apollo 11 space flight would successfully send humans to the moon, allowing us to see the Earth from space for the first time. Just as these rapid technological advances opened up radically new ways of comprehending the universe and our place within it, Fontana’s lacerated canvases pushed art into the unknown, breaking the boundaries between the picture’s surface and the infinite, expanding space beyond it. 

 

ZERO: Radical Art of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ZERO – LET US EXPLORE THE STARS, 2015

 

Fontana had trained initially as a sculptor, and through his Concetto spaziale he dissolved boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture, a practice that reached its full expression in the spatial environment that Fontana created for XXIII La Biennale di Venezia in 1966, just one year before the execution of the present work. In an installation that earned him the Grand Prize for Painting, Fontana presented an entire room of white Tagli, coming even closer to realising his vision for a new art for the post-war world. The radiant green of the present work connects directly with these visionary, immersive environments, where the artist embraced modern materials to continue his investigations into space and the nature of visual perception with neon, fluorescent tubes, and ultraviolet light. Recently recreated at the Hangar Biocca in Milan and originally conceived in 1961, the installation Fonti di energia, soffitto di neon per Italia 61 realised the interactions of colour, space, and light that had preoccupied the artist throughout his career on an immersive scale as green neon tubes criss-crossed their way across a black-ceilinged room, achieving the artist’s vision for recreating the immense infinitude of space.

 

Now widely recognised as one of the most innovative and radical artists of the post-war period, the first major international retrospective of Fontana’s work was hosted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1977, with subsequent retrospectives staged at some of the most prestigious institutions across the world, including the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1987; Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 1996; and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2006. Amongst his most highly celebrated works and representing the apotheosis of his aesthetic investigations, examples of his Concetto spaziale are held in major public and private collections, including The Metropolitan Museum in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, amongst others.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Fascinated by surface and the dimensionality of objects, Lucio Fontana’s iconic slashed and punctured canvases rank amongst the most immediately recognisable in 20th century art.
• His innovative approaches to the picture surface and the creative act would have far reaching effects across multiple disciplines including painting, sculpture, and performance art, and would radically influence the arte povera movement. 

 

 

ⁱ First Spatialist Manifesto, 1947, reproduced in Enrico Crispolti et al., eds., Lucio Fontana, Milan, 1998, pp. 117-118.