Concetto spaziale

As early as 1946, the Manifesto Blanco, which anticipated the later Spatial Manifestoes and which was written under Fontana's influence, declared that, 'We live in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist' (B. Arias, H. Cazeneuve and M. Fridman, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). Although Fontana spent much of his career breaking artistic conventions, he appears to purposely echo the standard practice of reserving a painting as a tablet for expressive iconography by laying down a torrent of gestural marks onto the surface of Concetto spaziale, then encircling them with a semi-ovoid periphery. Yet Fontana uses the presence of the personalized hand-drawn lines to make his violent rupture of the surface all the more alarming. Importantly, the marks are not daubed onto the surface in the conventional way, but etched into the paint to highlight the construct of the surface plane and the viscosity of the applied matter. The articulation of the surface adds a sense of the sculptural to Concetto spaziale, increasing its autonomous objecthood and emphasizing the leap into the third dimension that is made with the slash in the centre and the three stabbed holes below. Fontana typically kept his scratched lines separate from the cuts in his oil paintings of this period, using them to either define the contours of canvas punctures or to draw semi-figurative organic shapes. Unusually, he cuts directly through the dynamic sketchy lines of the present Concetto spaziale of 1961, completely negating the personal to introduce the universal, though intangible, phenomena of energy and space through the surface of the canvas. In this way, Fontana emphasizes his interest in eternity and his belief in the timeless and irrevocable nature of the artistic gesture, surpassing the temporal materiality of painting itself.