Lot12 L24006 3XRHX

Concetto spaziale is defined by a clarity of vision and execution which emblematises the pioneering spirit of Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist practice: a sublime fusion of light, movement and depth that gestures towards a cosmic infinity. Created in 1951, and later dedicated in 1953, the present work is supremely representative of the artist’s early series of Buchi (holes) which, in transcending conventional modes of artistic expression, investigated the potential of space and matter. In the present work, Fontana has pierced the canvas surface repeatedly, integrating the spaces in front of and behind the picture plane. The holes are carefully arranged, creating deliberately swirling patterns that comprise dense regions of smaller, precise punctures, interspersed with larger arrays of more jagged holes. Many of these larger incisions have a distinctive four-point appearance, perhaps from a screwdriver, evoking constellations of twinkling stars in a faraway galaxy. Each hole vibrates with quivering motion as if just punctured by the artist in his frenzied attempts to access the void of space latent behind the surface. “When I hit the canvas,” Fontana explained, “I sensed that I had made an important gesture. It was, in fact, not an incidental hole but a conscious hole: by making a hole in the picture I found a new dimension in the void. By making holes in the picture, I invented the fourth dimension” (the artist quoted in: Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 21). In this sense, Fontana's punctures serve as windows onto the concept of the infinite with Concetto spaziale forming a highly successful example of not only the Buchi, but also Fontana’s iconoclastic practice itself.

Fontana began creating his Buchi in 1948, inaugurating what was to become one of the twentieth century’s most radical gestures. Piercing the sacrosanct surface of the canvas, the artist transformed the picture plane from a flat zone of illusion to a real, inter-dimensional object. As Fontana himself explained, "I make a hole in a canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface" (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum and London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1988, p. 34). Laying the foundations for his revolutionary practice in the Manifesto Blanco, published in 1946 in his native Argentina, he further elucidated his defining Concetti spaziali in the Primo manifesto dello Spazialismo after moving back to Milan in 1947. His goal would be to “unchain art from matter” so it might correspond to the advances of science and technology in the time of the Space Age. Like Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, Fontana’s texts express a desire for change in cultural practices to align with contemporary mechanical innovations: “We call for a change in essence and form. We demand the overcoming of painting, sculpture, poetry, music. An art more closely aligned with the demands of the new spirit is required” (Lucio Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, n.p.).

By attacking the entire convention of the canvas as a finite object, Fontana indicated its destruction by physically breaking through the picture plane. Driven by his quest for a new visual idiom befitting the radical scientific, cultural, and philosophical shifts brought on by the nascent Space Age, Fontana conceived the penetration of the canvas as the ultimate negation of pictorial representation, seeking instead an artistic gestalt that could express the whole of existence: a synthesis of colour, movement, time and space. Erika Billeter commented on the ground-breaking importance of Fontana’s first perforation of the canvas: “Lucio Fontana in 1948 challenges the history of painting. With one bold stroke he pierces the canvas and tears it to shreds… 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” (Exh. Cat., Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006-07, p. 21). In this way, the invention of the buchi irrevocably altered preconceptions of art's permanency, opening into the infinite space beyond the canvas and infusing it with conceptual dynamism.

The work is dedicated on the reverse all’amico Sinisgalli (“to my friend Sinisgalli”). This refers to Leonardo Sinisgalli, an Italian poet, architect, graphic artist and critic who lived in Milan. In 1962, Sinisgalli wrote Ode a Lucio Fontana, a collection of essays and prints for which Fontana himself contributed etchings through collaboration with the Ancona printer, Brenno Bucciarelli. Within Fontana’s Spatialist universe, his Buchi can be seen as foundational components of his practice; in his own words, “I have not attempted to decorate a surface, but on the contrary; I have tried to break its dimensional limitations. Beyond the perforations, a newly gained freedom of interpretations awaits us, but also, and just as inevitably, the end of art” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Lucio Fontana, 1966, n.p.). In the puncturing of the canvas, they anticipate his iconic series of Tagli and Pietre, whilst also looking forward his landmark cycle La Fine di Dio, created between 1963 and 1964. In these otherworldly creations, defined by their distinctive ovoid-shaped canvases, the buchi reached their apotheosis, mutating into giant, fist-sized craters that the artist forged using his bare hands. In a similar way, the perforations of Concetto spaziale retain a rhythm that draws the eye back and forth, creating a kind of reverse impasto across the surface. Rather than reflecting the light, the buchi trap and cast it through the pierced picture plane. Of the new Spatialist era of the future, Fontana wrote: “Art is going to be a completely different thing... Not an object, nor a form... Nothing more to do with bourgeois consumption, beauty attached to a sellable object. Art is going to become infinite, immensity, immaterial, philosophy... Enough with the bourgeois function of art. Open the doors” (the artist quoted in: Art et création I, 1968, p. 78). The canvas would no longer be a mere vehicle for depicting the world. In this regard, Concetto spaziale stands as a superlative and poetic articulation of Fontana’s investigations into material, colour and space in all its forms.