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Lot Essay
Concetto spaziale, Attese was created by Lucio Fontana in 1967 and was first owned by the Galerie Pierre in Stockholm, which had held an exhibition of his works the same year. That exhibition took place the same year as a significant retrospective at the Moderna Museet in the same city. With its five slashes, each one a sheer vertical expression of the void, Concetto spaziale, Attese demonstrates the finesse that marked Lucio Fontana's so-called Tagli, or 'cuts'. They had evolved gradually, since their first inception in the works on paper he created during the late 1950s. In Concetto spaziale, Attese, there is a sense of visual rhythm that echoes musical scores, with the progression of four almost equal vertical slashes then a slight gap before a fifth, which comes as a form of consummation - or indeed after some 'expectation', recalling the meaning of Attese. There is a visual leap as the eye, especially the Western eye, 'reads' the picture from left to right, seeing the Morse Code-like progression of upright dashes against their lush, even, green background.
In 1967, Fontana was concurrently developing another innovation. These were the Elissi, which were sculptural iterations of his holes. In these works, which were made either of lacquered wood or machine worked metal, Fontana was able to create glossy three-dimensional counterparts to works such as his Tagli. The crisp sheen of those works appears to be reflected in the incredible evenness of Concetto spaziale, Attese.
The recto of Concetto spaziale, Attese appears to invoke an almost clinical perfectionism in its regular slashes, cutting through the uniform green of the backdrop. By contrast, as was often the case, the verso sports an inscription that reveals Fontana's more humorous and human side. Often on the reverse of his Tagli in particular, he would include some words or other, even taking the form of a numerical equation. In Concetto spaziale, Attese, the inscription reads: 'Cinzia had a really sexy miniskirt', thus revealing Fontana's playful side. At the same time, this whimsical reflection of his own day anchors the work to the moment of its inception, to the very day when Fontana created it using his smooth, elegant cuts again and again as he progressed across the canvas. This tethering of the work to the moment that Fontana opened up these specific spaces in the surface shows how the artist created works adhering to the doctrines he had originally espoused two decades earlier, in the 'First Spatial Manifesto' whose composition he oversaw in 1947:
'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal. It is eternal in that a gesture of art, like any other complete gesture, cannot fail to remain in the spirit of man as a perpetuated race... But being eternal does not mean that it is immortal. It might live one year or a thousand years, but the time of its material destruction will always come. It will remain eternal as a gesture, but it will die as matter... We plan to separate art from matter, to separate the sense of the eternal from the concern with the immortal. And it doesn't matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal' ('First Spatial Manifesto', signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., 1998, pp. 117-18).
In 1967, Fontana was concurrently developing another innovation. These were the Elissi, which were sculptural iterations of his holes. In these works, which were made either of lacquered wood or machine worked metal, Fontana was able to create glossy three-dimensional counterparts to works such as his Tagli. The crisp sheen of those works appears to be reflected in the incredible evenness of Concetto spaziale, Attese.
The recto of Concetto spaziale, Attese appears to invoke an almost clinical perfectionism in its regular slashes, cutting through the uniform green of the backdrop. By contrast, as was often the case, the verso sports an inscription that reveals Fontana's more humorous and human side. Often on the reverse of his Tagli in particular, he would include some words or other, even taking the form of a numerical equation. In Concetto spaziale, Attese, the inscription reads: 'Cinzia had a really sexy miniskirt', thus revealing Fontana's playful side. At the same time, this whimsical reflection of his own day anchors the work to the moment of its inception, to the very day when Fontana created it using his smooth, elegant cuts again and again as he progressed across the canvas. This tethering of the work to the moment that Fontana opened up these specific spaces in the surface shows how the artist created works adhering to the doctrines he had originally espoused two decades earlier, in the 'First Spatial Manifesto' whose composition he oversaw in 1947:
'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal. It is eternal in that a gesture of art, like any other complete gesture, cannot fail to remain in the spirit of man as a perpetuated race... But being eternal does not mean that it is immortal. It might live one year or a thousand years, but the time of its material destruction will always come. It will remain eternal as a gesture, but it will die as matter... We plan to separate art from matter, to separate the sense of the eternal from the concern with the immortal. And it doesn't matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal' ('First Spatial Manifesto', signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., 1998, pp. 117-18).