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Lot Essay
With its lively flickers of yellow paint against its textured, black background, Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale perfectly encapsulates the wealth of textures and techniques that characterised his so-called Barocchi, his 'Baroque' series, executed between 1953 and 1957. In these works, Fontana combined his recent discovery of the hole with other elements such as glass, as well as creating a deliberately massy paint surface.
The importance of Concetto spaziale is reflected in the fact that it was illustrated only two years after its creation in the publication Ark, where an English translation of Fontana's Technical Manifesto from 1947 appeared alongside a commentary by Lawrence Alloway. The Technical Manifesto itself was translated by Charles Damiano, the British representative of a large Italian company who lived in Hampshire and himself owned a formidable range of works by Fontana and many of his contemporaries. Indeed, this 1959 publication coincided with the exhibition of Italian post-war art from Damiano's collection at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, which also featured Concetto spaziale.
In Damiano's translation, Fontana was quoted as declaring that art needed to be overhauled to be in keeping with the modern world, and traced the need for change back to the Baroque:
'a change is necessary both in essence and form. It is necessary to overturn and transform painting, sculpture and poetry. 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).
For Fontana, the notion of the baroque was intrinsically linked to movement and dynamism. These are aspects that are perfectly crystallised in Concetto spaziale in the zig-zagging, darting yellow brushstrokes that form such a vibrant contrast with the dark backdrop. At the same time, the various light effects of the surface, which has holes, glittery elements and rich impasto forming crags and troughs, adds to this dynamism: the picture responds to its surroundings, embracing space within the holes, creating plays of light through the reflective material, and even causing small shadows to be cast across it.
In addition, the opulent variety of surface treatments heightens our awareness of the movement which was involved in creating the picture. The traces of Fontana's own actions are emblazoned across the picture surface. It comes as no surprise to find that the Barocchi such as Concetto spaziale are often considered to be the pinnacle of Fontana's involvement with Art Informel. The gestural application of paint serves as an electric and vivid reminder of Fontana's own brushwork. The presence of the painter is viscerally evoked through these techniques.
The rich sense of materiality in Concetto spaziale, so intrinsic to its Art Informel credentials, also introduces an intriguing continuation of the Baroque aesthetic. While this work is clearly not figurative, with the flashes of yellow serving as calligraphic highlights rather than actual signs, there is nonetheless a sense of flourish to this work that echoes the works associated with the Baroque period. Indeed, the yellow areas have a sense of movement all their own, which relates to, say, the dramatic drapery in some Baroque sculptures and paintings. Meanwhile, the generosity of the heavily-laden surface itself has a Baroque dimension.
This very materiality emphasises the contrast with the space that penetrates the work in the small holes that perforate parts of its surface. The Barocchi are works of extremes within Fontana's oeuvre, contrasting the rich, even overwhelming treatment of the surface with the sheer void of space, even if that void is encompassed in the pin-prick-like perforations of a painting like Concetto spaziale. Nonetheless, just as the historic Baroque period had introduced a new sense of movement to art, so too Fontana's Spatialism broke new boundaries, highlighting and responding to the changes in perception of the world in the post-war period.
By this time, man's movements were no longer limited to the earth: instead, the skies, and indeed the cosmos itself, were increasingly becoming mankind's habitat. It was in October 1957, the year that Concetto spaziale was made, that the Russians managed to launch Sputnik into orbit, a revelation in its own right. Now, Fontana's predictions of man penetrating Space were coming to fruition. He was living in an age of rockets and televisions: figurative art, he reasoned, no longer had a purpose. A new art was needed. In the Barocchi like Concetto spaziale, Fontana was exploring the end of painting and bringing in a new sensitivity. The holes which introduced space into the picture surface were made all the more dramatic by their contrast with the glittery, caked paint surrounding them, resulting in a rich and lyrical work. Meanwhile, the flashes of light and colour against the dark backdrop of Concetto spaziale also lend it a cosmic dimension, as though it were charting some imaginary constellation or galaxy, filled with the shimmering light of a thousand stars.
The importance of Concetto spaziale is reflected in the fact that it was illustrated only two years after its creation in the publication Ark, where an English translation of Fontana's Technical Manifesto from 1947 appeared alongside a commentary by Lawrence Alloway. The Technical Manifesto itself was translated by Charles Damiano, the British representative of a large Italian company who lived in Hampshire and himself owned a formidable range of works by Fontana and many of his contemporaries. Indeed, this 1959 publication coincided with the exhibition of Italian post-war art from Damiano's collection at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, which also featured Concetto spaziale.
In Damiano's translation, Fontana was quoted as declaring that art needed to be overhauled to be in keeping with the modern world, and traced the need for change back to the Baroque:
'a change is necessary both in essence and form. It is necessary to overturn and transform painting, sculpture and poetry. 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).
For Fontana, the notion of the baroque was intrinsically linked to movement and dynamism. These are aspects that are perfectly crystallised in Concetto spaziale in the zig-zagging, darting yellow brushstrokes that form such a vibrant contrast with the dark backdrop. At the same time, the various light effects of the surface, which has holes, glittery elements and rich impasto forming crags and troughs, adds to this dynamism: the picture responds to its surroundings, embracing space within the holes, creating plays of light through the reflective material, and even causing small shadows to be cast across it.
In addition, the opulent variety of surface treatments heightens our awareness of the movement which was involved in creating the picture. The traces of Fontana's own actions are emblazoned across the picture surface. It comes as no surprise to find that the Barocchi such as Concetto spaziale are often considered to be the pinnacle of Fontana's involvement with Art Informel. The gestural application of paint serves as an electric and vivid reminder of Fontana's own brushwork. The presence of the painter is viscerally evoked through these techniques.
The rich sense of materiality in Concetto spaziale, so intrinsic to its Art Informel credentials, also introduces an intriguing continuation of the Baroque aesthetic. While this work is clearly not figurative, with the flashes of yellow serving as calligraphic highlights rather than actual signs, there is nonetheless a sense of flourish to this work that echoes the works associated with the Baroque period. Indeed, the yellow areas have a sense of movement all their own, which relates to, say, the dramatic drapery in some Baroque sculptures and paintings. Meanwhile, the generosity of the heavily-laden surface itself has a Baroque dimension.
This very materiality emphasises the contrast with the space that penetrates the work in the small holes that perforate parts of its surface. The Barocchi are works of extremes within Fontana's oeuvre, contrasting the rich, even overwhelming treatment of the surface with the sheer void of space, even if that void is encompassed in the pin-prick-like perforations of a painting like Concetto spaziale. Nonetheless, just as the historic Baroque period had introduced a new sense of movement to art, so too Fontana's Spatialism broke new boundaries, highlighting and responding to the changes in perception of the world in the post-war period.
By this time, man's movements were no longer limited to the earth: instead, the skies, and indeed the cosmos itself, were increasingly becoming mankind's habitat. It was in October 1957, the year that Concetto spaziale was made, that the Russians managed to launch Sputnik into orbit, a revelation in its own right. Now, Fontana's predictions of man penetrating Space were coming to fruition. He was living in an age of rockets and televisions: figurative art, he reasoned, no longer had a purpose. A new art was needed. In the Barocchi like Concetto spaziale, Fontana was exploring the end of painting and bringing in a new sensitivity. The holes which introduced space into the picture surface were made all the more dramatic by their contrast with the glittery, caked paint surrounding them, resulting in a rich and lyrical work. Meanwhile, the flashes of light and colour against the dark backdrop of Concetto spaziale also lend it a cosmic dimension, as though it were charting some imaginary constellation or galaxy, filled with the shimmering light of a thousand stars.