Lucio Fontana

Betty Barman Collection, Brussels
Private Collection, France (by descent)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 26 June 2003, Lot 214
Private Collection, Italy
Sale: Sotheby's, Milan, Contemporary Art, 24 May 2012, Lot 31
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 109, no. 61 O 26, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Fontana: Catalogo Generale, Vol. I, Milan 1986, p. 366, no. 61 O 26, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 550, no. 61 O 26, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals two minute and unobtrusive pinprick-sized specks of loss below the centre of the extreme right side edge and one to the top of the vertical slash. Close examination reveals a small number of very fine and isolated hairline cracks towards the lower right corner. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals that these have been stabilised.
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With its sumptuous gold surface, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale is an exquisite example of the radical discoveries on which the artist embarked during the last decade of his influential career. Appealing in both its captivating hue and opulent materiality, the painting perfectly embodies the artist’s inventive explorations in oil paint, as well as his love of the Baroque, which he explored extensively in his earlier sculptures.

Lucio Fontana would only definitively commit to the medium of oil in 1960, in a series of paintings that have become known as the Olii. Begun only a year after his most acclaimed artistic breakthrough (the Taglie), this new body of work signalled Fontana’s confidence and increasing curiosity in the qualities of different mediums. Whilst the present work beautifully encapsulates the artist’s most revolutionary artistic theorem - his interest in the void, expressed through the transgression of flat pictorial space – the physicality of the oil paint also signifies a shift from his philosophical explorations of space towards a more physical understanding. This material exploration of space is beautifully embodied in Concetto Spaziale, where the tactile and textured quality of the painted surface extends the picture plane not only inwards through the canvas, but also outwards towards the viewer. As Fontana explained himself; “space is not abstraction anymore, but… a dimension in which man can actually live, violating it with jets, with the Sputniks, with the spaceships” (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 96).

Fontana’s allusion to actual outer space conquered by spaceships is a deliberate one, as the olii were inspired by much more pressing developments than his earlier philosophical considerations. Reacting to the first man in space in 1961, the artist felt the need to express more urgent and existential concerns as a reaction to the rapid developments of the space age, echoed by his much stronger, restless use of colour and the physicality of the canvasses in the olii series. Instead of the considered, sharp incisions of the taglie, the holes in this series are ripped into the fabric - suggesting a more primal impulse. The surrounding oval line, scratched into the surface of the paint, is reminiscent of an umbilical cord, and indeed of the existential connection between the astronaut and his spaceship. Not only is Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale therefore a beautifully baroque painting in its lush colour and surface texture, but also a quintessential manifestation of both the philosophical and physical investigations that preoccupied the artist during the 1960s.