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Lot Essay
'Once an American in Venice said to me, "Youre the spatialist but you dont understand about spaces. Who are you anyway?" Later he got to know me but did not understand anything. He found out that I am Fontana and am a spatialist. "But how can you understand space? Weve got Arizona. Theres space for you..." So I said to him, "Look, if it comes to that, I come from South America and we have the Pampas which is twice the size of Arizona. I am not interested in the kind of space you are talking about. Mine is a different dimension." The "hole" is this dimension (Fontana, quoted in T. Trini, 'The last interview given by Fontana, pp. 34-36, W. Beeren & N. Serota (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Amsterdam & London, 1988, p. 34).
With its lush, green surface, Concetto spaziale speaks of life, of foliage, of fertility. Lucio Fontana created Concetto spaziale in 1960, and the surface bears the marks of his signature penetrations. Holes have been punctured in a constellation across much of the central sweep of Concetto spaziale. Meanwhile, liberal dashes of impasto articulate the surface further, creating a complex, dynamic tension and emphasising the investigation of the various dimensions that lies at the heart of Fontana's works.
Dating from 1960, Concetto spaziale was made a short time after Fontana had pioneered his Attese, the elegant slashes usually on monochrome canvases that he invented. Crucially, works such as Concetto spaziale demonstrate that he did not abandon the visual language that he had developed over the preceding decade, beginning with his first Buchi in works on paper in the late 1940s. Throughout the 1950s, Fontana had turned increasingly towards painting, despite having formerly been considered a sculptor. And yet what he brought to painting was an illustration of its own sculptural properties: in Concetto spaziale, he has created holes in the surface while also adding to it, highlighting the concept that a picture is not just a two-dimensional arena, but instead an object in the round in its own right.
In Concetto spaziale, the painterliness of the picture is emphasised by Fontana's exploration of the different properties of the oil paint that he has used, which he has allowed to function as an echo of the pietri, the stones or shards of coloured glass with which he ornamented some of his other canvases. This three-dimensionality is all the more vivid in a work like this, where the surface has become an abstract relief, a concept that Fontana himself demonstrated shortly after he created his earliest Buchi, when he showed them in raking light, resulting in an incredible variety of effects. So too in Concetto spaziale, the holes and the elements jutting out from the surface add a play of textures and appearances that also introduce plays of light that allow it to shift its appearance, ever Protean.
The richly-worked and densely-punctured surface of Concetto spaziale also emphasises the degree to which Fontana was introducing Time, the Fourth Dimension, to his paintings. Looking at the scattering of holes that articulate this surface as well as the paint manipulated and apparently appended to it, the viewer has a visceral sense of the artist's own motions in creating the picture. His movements, now rapid and now measured, and his decisions can be traced in the chronicle that is the surface. For Fontana, the act of artistic creation, or intervention, was eternal, and nowhere was this more true than in his holes, areas of void that he himself had conjured into existence. This was the 'space' that lay at the heart of Spatialism. At the same time, Fontana invokes the passage of time both in the changing light effects of the surface as light plays upon it and also in the vivid sense that it conveys of the artist's own movements fifty-two years ago as he created it. This green surface, which speaks of warmth and of life, thereby vividly records Fontana's own life.
The green also serves to invoke landscape. Looking at Concetto spaziale, one gains the sense that, despite its supposed abstraction, this picture provides a sort of panorama of a new, verdant world, recalling the aerial views enjoyed by aviators or even glimpses of landmasses seen from space. With its miniature craters and its globules affixed to the surface, Concetto spaziale has its own topography. Fontana's paintings were intended to embody the leaps in technology and thinking that defined the Twentieth Century and the modern age. Just as his new appreciation of the canvas as a three-dimensional object rather than a zone for fictive, illusory representation marked a paradigm shift that would continue to reverberate for decades to come as other artists came to reappraise it, so too Man's ability first to fly and then to leave the Earth's atmosphere were intense breaks with all that had gone before. Looking down from orbit, satellites had seen the Earth from a vividly new perspective, and the year after Concetto spaziale was painted, Yuri Gagarin would circle the planet in his Vostok spacecraft, the first Earthling to escape the bounds of our common atmosphere. The old bonds between Man and Earth were being ruptured, and Fontana reflected this by tearing open the canvas that had for centuries been associated with high art, demonstrating its redundancy while allowing it to serve as a forum for a new kind of painting, one that involved Space.
With its lush, green surface, Concetto spaziale speaks of life, of foliage, of fertility. Lucio Fontana created Concetto spaziale in 1960, and the surface bears the marks of his signature penetrations. Holes have been punctured in a constellation across much of the central sweep of Concetto spaziale. Meanwhile, liberal dashes of impasto articulate the surface further, creating a complex, dynamic tension and emphasising the investigation of the various dimensions that lies at the heart of Fontana's works.
Dating from 1960, Concetto spaziale was made a short time after Fontana had pioneered his Attese, the elegant slashes usually on monochrome canvases that he invented. Crucially, works such as Concetto spaziale demonstrate that he did not abandon the visual language that he had developed over the preceding decade, beginning with his first Buchi in works on paper in the late 1940s. Throughout the 1950s, Fontana had turned increasingly towards painting, despite having formerly been considered a sculptor. And yet what he brought to painting was an illustration of its own sculptural properties: in Concetto spaziale, he has created holes in the surface while also adding to it, highlighting the concept that a picture is not just a two-dimensional arena, but instead an object in the round in its own right.
In Concetto spaziale, the painterliness of the picture is emphasised by Fontana's exploration of the different properties of the oil paint that he has used, which he has allowed to function as an echo of the pietri, the stones or shards of coloured glass with which he ornamented some of his other canvases. This three-dimensionality is all the more vivid in a work like this, where the surface has become an abstract relief, a concept that Fontana himself demonstrated shortly after he created his earliest Buchi, when he showed them in raking light, resulting in an incredible variety of effects. So too in Concetto spaziale, the holes and the elements jutting out from the surface add a play of textures and appearances that also introduce plays of light that allow it to shift its appearance, ever Protean.
The richly-worked and densely-punctured surface of Concetto spaziale also emphasises the degree to which Fontana was introducing Time, the Fourth Dimension, to his paintings. Looking at the scattering of holes that articulate this surface as well as the paint manipulated and apparently appended to it, the viewer has a visceral sense of the artist's own motions in creating the picture. His movements, now rapid and now measured, and his decisions can be traced in the chronicle that is the surface. For Fontana, the act of artistic creation, or intervention, was eternal, and nowhere was this more true than in his holes, areas of void that he himself had conjured into existence. This was the 'space' that lay at the heart of Spatialism. At the same time, Fontana invokes the passage of time both in the changing light effects of the surface as light plays upon it and also in the vivid sense that it conveys of the artist's own movements fifty-two years ago as he created it. This green surface, which speaks of warmth and of life, thereby vividly records Fontana's own life.
The green also serves to invoke landscape. Looking at Concetto spaziale, one gains the sense that, despite its supposed abstraction, this picture provides a sort of panorama of a new, verdant world, recalling the aerial views enjoyed by aviators or even glimpses of landmasses seen from space. With its miniature craters and its globules affixed to the surface, Concetto spaziale has its own topography. Fontana's paintings were intended to embody the leaps in technology and thinking that defined the Twentieth Century and the modern age. Just as his new appreciation of the canvas as a three-dimensional object rather than a zone for fictive, illusory representation marked a paradigm shift that would continue to reverberate for decades to come as other artists came to reappraise it, so too Man's ability first to fly and then to leave the Earth's atmosphere were intense breaks with all that had gone before. Looking down from orbit, satellites had seen the Earth from a vividly new perspective, and the year after Concetto spaziale was painted, Yuri Gagarin would circle the planet in his Vostok spacecraft, the first Earthling to escape the bounds of our common atmosphere. The old bonds between Man and Earth were being ruptured, and Fontana reflected this by tearing open the canvas that had for centuries been associated with high art, demonstrating its redundancy while allowing it to serve as a forum for a new kind of painting, one that involved Space.