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Lot Essay
Executed in 1953, Concetto spaziale is an early example of Lucio Fontana's rare and celebrated series of Pietre paintings. Its swirling composition of bold, gestural brushmarks is studded with jagged fragments of coloured glass and scattershot holes. It is a complex textural surface of diametrically opposed forces, where light refracting protrusions, graphic ciphers, and dark, receding voids coalesce to articulate Fontana's Spatialist agenda. This is an elaborate progression on the literal and figurative breakthrough that Fontana made with his first Buchi, or holes, made only four years before. The simple, physical act of piercing the picture surface had developed out of the theories Fontana formulated with his students at the Accademia di Altamira in Buenos Aires during the war years. Borrowing the language and the vision of Futurism, they advocated doing away with the traditions of painted canvas and sculpture to explore the dynamic concepts of movement, colour, time and space. On his return to Milan in 1947, Fontana began to truly grasp the implications and potential of the beliefs that he had consolidated in Argentina. From this moment all of his experiments were entitled Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts), among which a progression of categories unfolds. The Buchi began his preoccupation with breaking through the membrane of two-dimensionality into the infinite space that lies on the other side of the picture plane. The Pietre (stones) series, instigated in 1951, expands upon this theory, dramatically fusing the sculptural with painting by including concretions that push outwards, into the realm of the viewer.
In Concetto spaziale, both the addition of the three-dimensional stones and the puncturing of the surface open up the viewer's understanding of the nature of the canvas. They are a way of making the viewer look beyond the physical fact of the painting, to what Fontana called 'free space', which was for him both a philosophical and visual concept. The addition of pietre also infuse the surface of the canvas with the transitory elements of light and motion as the jewel-like glass glistens in such a way as to suggest a sense of astral space. 'When I began using the stones,' Fontana said, 'I wanted to see if I could move forward...I thought that with the stones, the light would flow better - that it would create more the effect of movement' (Lucio Fontana, 1967, quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 1999, p. 17). This sense of dynamism is highlighted by the surrounding painted forms, which join the stones and holes into a unified composition. Fontana's expressive, painterly marks reveal why he occupied such an important position within the context of the Informel movement that dominated the avant-gardes in both the United States and Europe at this time. But what marks Concetto spaziale out from the work of other Informel artists such as Burri, De Kooning or Dubuffet is the fact that our awareness of Fontana's own artistic activity is vividly augmented by the intriguing interplay of space and of light, and the painting's ability to interact with its environment. Here, Fontana has found an artistic language that responds to the gestural painting characteristic of Informel, while at the same time enabling him to suggest something more universal than its self-referential nature. 'I am not informal,' Fontana argued. 'The informal seeks the result in the gesture...my nature is attracted rather to space' (Fontana quoted in M. Valsecchi, 'L'uomo ora e nello spazio e l'arte viaggia con lui,'
Tempo, 9 May 1964, p. 49). By drawing attention to the materiality of canvas with the puncture, and disrupting its planar nature with glass appendages, Fontana has deliberately ruptured the neutral 'arena' upon which gestural abstraction relies. In this work, the holes and stones act as perfect conceptual counterpoints, whereby the presence of matter is negated by the void's sense of absence.
The multi-coloured pietre also introduce a visual wealth and opulence to Concetto spaziale that invoke the spirit of the Baroque. Fontana's relationship with the Baroque had begun early in his career, as was exemplified in his mosaic-covered sculptures forms during the 1930s. It also played a crucial part in the development of Spatialism, including his early installations involving ultraviolet lights that illuminated arabesque forms hanging in an otherwise darkened space. These forms became central motifs in his paintings too, as is exemplified by Concetto spaziale.
In this work, the black, calligraphic brushstrokes entwine to form an image that teeters on the brink of the recognisable. There is the vaguest hint of a figure, or of some strange nebula or hurtling asteroid. However, the crucial characteristic conjured by these forms is that of movement. Movement, time passing, matter passing through space: these are the qualities that lay at the heart of Fontana's Spatialism, an aesthetic that was appropriate to the dawning Space Age. It was this sense of movement that was also crucial to the Baroque, as Fontana himself explained:
'A form of art is now demanded which is based on the necessity of this new vision. The baroque has guided us in this direction, in all its as yet unsurpassed grandeur, where the plastic form is inseparable from the notion of time, the images appear to abandon the plane and continue into space the movements they suggest. This conception arose from man's new idea of the existence of things; the physics of that period reveal for the first time the nature of dynamics. It is established that movement is an essential condition of matter as a beginning of the conception of the universe' (Lucio Fontana, Manifesto tecnico dello Spazialismo, trans. C. Damiano, 1951, reproduced in L. Massimo Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat., Venice & New York, 2006, p. 229).
Further examples from the Pietre series are housed in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, and the van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
In Concetto spaziale, both the addition of the three-dimensional stones and the puncturing of the surface open up the viewer's understanding of the nature of the canvas. They are a way of making the viewer look beyond the physical fact of the painting, to what Fontana called 'free space', which was for him both a philosophical and visual concept. The addition of pietre also infuse the surface of the canvas with the transitory elements of light and motion as the jewel-like glass glistens in such a way as to suggest a sense of astral space. 'When I began using the stones,' Fontana said, 'I wanted to see if I could move forward...I thought that with the stones, the light would flow better - that it would create more the effect of movement' (Lucio Fontana, 1967, quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 1999, p. 17). This sense of dynamism is highlighted by the surrounding painted forms, which join the stones and holes into a unified composition. Fontana's expressive, painterly marks reveal why he occupied such an important position within the context of the Informel movement that dominated the avant-gardes in both the United States and Europe at this time. But what marks Concetto spaziale out from the work of other Informel artists such as Burri, De Kooning or Dubuffet is the fact that our awareness of Fontana's own artistic activity is vividly augmented by the intriguing interplay of space and of light, and the painting's ability to interact with its environment. Here, Fontana has found an artistic language that responds to the gestural painting characteristic of Informel, while at the same time enabling him to suggest something more universal than its self-referential nature. 'I am not informal,' Fontana argued. 'The informal seeks the result in the gesture...my nature is attracted rather to space' (Fontana quoted in M. Valsecchi, 'L'uomo ora e nello spazio e l'arte viaggia con lui,'
Tempo, 9 May 1964, p. 49). By drawing attention to the materiality of canvas with the puncture, and disrupting its planar nature with glass appendages, Fontana has deliberately ruptured the neutral 'arena' upon which gestural abstraction relies. In this work, the holes and stones act as perfect conceptual counterpoints, whereby the presence of matter is negated by the void's sense of absence.
The multi-coloured pietre also introduce a visual wealth and opulence to Concetto spaziale that invoke the spirit of the Baroque. Fontana's relationship with the Baroque had begun early in his career, as was exemplified in his mosaic-covered sculptures forms during the 1930s. It also played a crucial part in the development of Spatialism, including his early installations involving ultraviolet lights that illuminated arabesque forms hanging in an otherwise darkened space. These forms became central motifs in his paintings too, as is exemplified by Concetto spaziale.
In this work, the black, calligraphic brushstrokes entwine to form an image that teeters on the brink of the recognisable. There is the vaguest hint of a figure, or of some strange nebula or hurtling asteroid. However, the crucial characteristic conjured by these forms is that of movement. Movement, time passing, matter passing through space: these are the qualities that lay at the heart of Fontana's Spatialism, an aesthetic that was appropriate to the dawning Space Age. It was this sense of movement that was also crucial to the Baroque, as Fontana himself explained:
'A form of art is now demanded which is based on the necessity of this new vision. The baroque has guided us in this direction, in all its as yet unsurpassed grandeur, where the plastic form is inseparable from the notion of time, the images appear to abandon the plane and continue into space the movements they suggest. This conception arose from man's new idea of the existence of things; the physics of that period reveal for the first time the nature of dynamics. It is established that movement is an essential condition of matter as a beginning of the conception of the universe' (Lucio Fontana, Manifesto tecnico dello Spazialismo, trans. C. Damiano, 1951, reproduced in L. Massimo Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat., Venice & New York, 2006, p. 229).
Further examples from the Pietre series are housed in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, and the van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.