“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.”
Rhythmically traversing the immaculate plane of searing blue, the five exquisitely precise incisions of Concetto spaziale, Attese epitomize the very essence of Lucio Fontana’s iconic career. In his quest to liberate the painterly medium and move towards the fourth dimension, Fontana’s mature works from his last decade encompass some of his most important artistic achievements, all masterfully distilled into the present work. Executed in 1968, the final year of the artist’s life and at the apex of his critically acclaimed career, Concetto spaziale, Attese belongs to Fontana’s series of tagli (cuts) and embodies the consistent investigation of his evolving conceptual project, known as Spazialismo. The pinnacle of this project was expressed most purely for Fontana in the penetration of the traditional flat plane of the medium, which opened the material of the canvas and infused it with the space endlessly expanding behind, around, and through it. With the dawn of the Space Age, heralded by Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, came an entirely new dimension that is most powerfully reflected in the aesthetics of Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein; for Fontana, the astronaut’s launch into the infinity of the cosmos is echoed in the void created by his five dramatic perforations. These slashes ruptured not only the canvas itself, but the traditional boundary between painting and sculpture, bringing a new dimension to art. Conjuring the iconic celestial blue palette of Yves Klein with its resplendent azure canvas, Fontana's Concetto spaziale, Attese articulates the genesis of a new form of artistic expression and offers a reflection on the astral age.
Though seemingly impulsive, the severe slashes on the surface of Fontana’s canvas are the result of a rational and surgical process of image-making. For the tagli series, Fontana’s gestural performance began by soaking his canvases with emulsion paint, which he then left to dry. After meticulously piercing the surface with a Stanley Knife, he would open the cuts gently with the edge of his blade. As a final step, Fontana inserted black gauze as interfacing behind each incision to create the illusion of infinite depth. As such, the artist’s hand was paramount to this process, the severe slashes revealing the highly physical nature of his works. Fontana’s training in classical sculpture is central to the performative process of the tagli canvases, for their gestural nature recalls the rigorous process of direct carving. Emancipating himself from two-dimensional space, Fontana radically ruptured the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
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1933Lucio Fontana in his Milan studio with Bagnante (Bather), 1933.
Lucio Fontana began as a sculptor in the early 1930s and 1940s. His initial works, rooted in the avant-garde, defied European sculptural tendencies by balancing the abstract and figurative, spatial and baroque.
Fontana’s sculptures were pivotal to his artistic evolution into painting; the sculptures are evidence of Fontana’s progressive, innovative approach to material.
“With one bold stroke he pierces the canvas and tears it to shreds. Through this action he declares before the entire world that the canvas is no longer a pictorial vehicle and asserts that easel painting, a constant in art heretofore, is called into question. Implied in this gesture is both the termination of a five-hundred-year evolution in Western painting and a new beginning, for destruction carries innovation in its wake.”
Oscillating between sculptural materiality and painterly essence, the crisp and syncopated incisions in Concetto spaziale, Attese are suffused with the idea of rebirth in the age of cosmic exploration, and the artist’s unbridled enthusiasm for space as ineffable and infinite. Fontana was explicit with regard to his emulation of the cosmic explorations of his era, and confident in the implication that his actions had for the course of art history: “The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: thus I pierce the canvas, which is the basis of all arts and I have created an infinite dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary Art” (Lucio Fontana cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 19). Distilling the past, present, and future into a composition of striking simplicity and profound potency, Concetto spaziale, Attese is a prime example of the manner in which Fontana was able to instigate a paradigm shift in post-war art, galvanizing the discourse to keep up with concurrent progressions in space travel.
Further, the electric azure blue of the hand-painted canvas amplifies the painting’s underlying metaphysical concept: its vividness and intensity invoke the great expanse of the sky above. Like the transcendent color field paintings of Mark Rothko, the monochrome hue draws the viewer into introspective meditation. This particular shade of cobalt not only evokes the contemplative sensation of gazing into the heavens on a clear day, but also echoes Yves Klein’s series of Anthropometries, and his trademark IKB pigment. Klein famously used the human body as anthropomorphic brushes, dragging and imprinting forms across sheets of paper and canvas; in the present work, poetic incisions imbue the celestial blue canvas with rhythmic movement. Fontana's spatial openings find further parallel in Klein's progression from the monochrome to the void, which similarly suggests an immaterial presence to invoke cosmic and spiritual ideals. Fontana and Klein's reciprocal influence on each others' artistic practices resonates in their respectively distinct dynamic and sensual approaches to abstraction, both privileging a radicalizing renegotiation of the pictorial surface. Where a 19-year-old Klein, lying on a beach in Nice, imagined signing his name in the clouds and declaring the sky as his first work of art, so Fontana distilled the sky's unknowable essence and abyssal blue into the very fabric of the present work.
"The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: thus I pierce the canvas, which is the basis of all arts and I have created an infinite dimension..."
In a combination of surface and depth, aesthetics and philosophy, emotive sensuality and scientific rigor, Concetto spaziale, Attese forms a mosaic of Fontana’s rich inspirations that culminate in a powerful visual sensation. Participant and witness to the world wars that rocked early 20th-century Europe, the artist harnessed the existential dread of a battle-worn generation and slashed through his monochrome canvases with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. In her essay on the artist’s retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1977, art historian Erika Billeter wrote, “With one bold stroke he pierces the canvas and tears it to shreds. Through this action he declares before the entire world that the canvas is no longer a pictorial vehicle and asserts that easel painting, a constant in art heretofore, is called into question. Implied in this gesture is both the termination of a five-hundred-year evolution in Western painting and a new beginning, for destruction carries innovation in its wake” (Erika Billeter, Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006-07, p. 21). Concetto spaziale, Attese can therefore be seen not only as a conceptual investigation into the boundaries of artistic media, but also as a metaphysical exploration of the confines of man’s existence.
