LUCIO FONTANA | Concetto spaziale, Attese

Gallerie Burén, Stockholm
Private Collection, Sweden (acquired from the above in 1966)
Christie’s, London, 27 June, 1996, Lot 52 (consigned by the above) 
Private Collection
Christie’s, London, 24 October 2005, Lot 23 (consigned by the above) 
FaMa Gallery, Verona 
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2008

Beirut, Aïshti Foundation, New Skin, Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, October 2015 - September 2016, p. 201, illustrated in colour 

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures, Sculptures et Environnements Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p.153, no. 64 T 31, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 521, no. 64 T 31, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Milan 2006, Vol. II, p. 711, no. 64 T 31, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they are deeper, richer and more vibrant in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Lucio Fontana’s rhythmic and elegant Concetto spaziale, Attese comprises a syncopated progression of incisions across an azure blue canvas: an archetypal exemplar of the artist’s famed Tagli series rendered in a deep and contemplative hue. The rich vitality of the vivid blue pigment is immediately impactful, its saturated intensity amplified through contrast with the plunging black voids. Bristling with connotations, this canvas is charged with the colour of calm and serenity – of meditative introspection and allusion to the natural world. Its abundant richness is tempered only by the punctuating presence of five deep and lyrical slashes, each imbued with a fleeting, dance-like vigour, as if part of an immutable crescendo of beauty and brutality. The artistic theory behind the creation of the Tagli (cuts) was professed in Fontana’s first manifesto, the Manifiesto Bianco, published in 1946. Here Fontana proposed the birth of a new Spatialist art, which sought to articulate the fourth dimension. In this quest, Fontana proposed the artist as the source of creative energy: anticipating future events and engaging with technological advancement, he asserted that the artist’s work should aspire to enlighten ordinary people to the possibilities offered by their environment and society. Thus, ever since first puncturing a canvas in 1949, Fontana had been singularly committed to the Spatialist mission to explore the conceptual depths beyond the limits of the two-dimensional picture plane.

With its electric blue palette, Concetto spaziale, Attese is deeply reminiscent of Yves Klein’s Blue Monochromes. Indeed in 1957, Fontana famously acquired one of Klein’s iconic paintings after seeing a series of them in an exhibition at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan. Although born some 30 years apart, each artist found resonance in the other’s work and, inspired by the searing potency of Klein’s blue, Fontana sought to imbue his own paintings with the transcendent force of colour. In the present work, the azure and celestial blue of the hand-painted canvas amplifies the painting’s innate organicism: its vividness and intensity invoke the great expanse of the sky above. Where a 19-year old Klein, lying on a beach in Nice, famously imagined signing his name in the clouds and declared 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. 

By the 1960s, Fontana’s practice of breaking through the canvas and into a heretofore unexplored territory beyond had gained newfound relevance alongside ground-breaking concurrent advances in space travel. The ‘Space Race’ had established the moon as the next frontier for human exploration and dominated the global political zeitgeist. As such, Fontana was at pains to emulate this scientific paradigm shift in his artistry: just as Yuri Gagarin broke through the atmosphere to reveal the void behind it, Fontana irrevocably changed the course of art. To this end, the strips of black gauze positioned behind each cut, or telleta, are as central to the interpretation of this work as the narrow cuts themselves. They imply the blackness of space and the insurmountable nothingness of the cosmological void. 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 contemplative calm, Concetto spaziale, Attese is a prime example of the manner in which Fontana was able to instigate a paradigm shift in post-war art, galvanising the discourse to keep up with concurrent progressions in space travel. It is works of this nature that have installed Fontana’s oeuvre at the pinnacle of Italian post-war art.