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Lot Essay
With its vast, thick surface, black as the night sky, thrillingly penetrated by a constellation of violent lacerations at its heart, Concetto Spaziale is an outstanding example of Lucio Fontana’s landmark series of Olii. As an extension of the celebrated cycle of Venezia paintings, which perhaps best encapsulates this series, the present work is one of only 12 paintings on this vast scale which depict the ambition of Fontana's vision. Executed at the dawn of the Space Age, the year after Yuri Gargarin first soared into space, the ten orifices that comprise the deep black paint-soaked canvas are alive with the air and light that pass through them. Fontana lovingly built layer after layer of oil paint, creating this surface of thick texture, which at its top layer, becomes a mysterious, near reflective sheen. He then set to work on penetrating it with holes which are at once violent, yet sensitive, composed yet random, and whose very existence threatens the stability of the surface which they are supposed to be supporting. The present work was included in Fontana’s ground-breaking exhibition held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1966, which later travelled to the University of Texas Art Museum.
In Fontana's Concetto spaziale, he takes this concept further, replacing the raw canvas with a densely laden, oil paint-hewn surface in which he aimed to incorporate the sumptuous, malleable quality of the traditional medium of oil paint into his 'Spatialist' aesthetic. The olii took the artist's trademark punctured and slashed canvases in an entirely new and highly textural direction, their visceral perforations emphasise the transmutation of solid matter into the nothingness of space. For Fontana, the dawning of the Space age had rendered all matter and the art object in particular - the painting or the sculpture - obsolete. Only a year before Concetto spaziale was created, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made his epic voyage in the Vostok 1, becoming the first human being to journey into outer space. This achievement marked the first moment that a person was able to look at the planet Earth hanging suspended in the abyss of space. The pitch black surface of Concetto spaziale not only reflects Fontana’s concepts, put it perfectly encapsulates the dark nothingness of space. Man had never left the atmosphere before, and this newfound awareness of our spatial context marked a massive shift in perspective. Suddenly the cosmos was opened as a new dimension to humanity, beginning of an era of infinite potential.
Fontana pioneered the concept of Spazialismo, a radical revision of the purposes of cultural production that advocated 'art based on the unity of time and space' (Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 116). Turning away from the materialism of his recent sculptural practice, Fontana began to investigate the possibilities of raw materials, no longer using the canvas as an illustrative carrier of meaning but as an active catalyst in the definition of space. In this project, Fontana was deeply engaged with the geopolitical context of the new Nuclear age, characterised by advances in quantum physics and pioneering space exploration. In a stunningly simple yet innovative gesture, Fontana replaced painting with bucchi (holes) or tagli (cuts) opening up a two dimensional canvas into a third plane, disrupting the illusion of the flat surface and exposing it to the concept of 'beyond': a process that was to define his oeuvre.
While Fontana’s ‘Spatialist Manifesto’ declared the painted canvas obsolete, in Concetto spaziale and his other olii works, we see him intensely interacting with the material aspects of painting. The Informel that had influenced and run parallel to Fontana's developments and discoveries in the immediate post-War period here finds itself in a new guise, holding hands with the Baroque. This unlikely union results in the peculiar yet potent visual energy that defines so many of the Olii: a resounding tension links on the one hand the gleaming finish afforded by the sumptuous paint, and on the other hand, the raw expression and actions that show Fontana's own exuberant enjoyment of the act of painterly creation itself. Yet ultimately, in playing with these materials, in piercing them and swirling them, Fontana is not only celebrating them, but is also pointing to their own limitations, balancing the implied mortality of paint, canvas and, by extension, painter with the eternal nature of the gestures of creation and the eternal nature of the sculpted space that is embedded within Concetto spaziale. It is this gesture and this creation of a void within the canvas that is so fundamental to his Spatialist theory. By creating multiple perforations that emphasise the contrast between material and the void, Fontana furnishes a new relationship with the work through its meditation not only on space, but on movement, temporality and the notion of the eternal as well.
In Concetto spaziale, the artist has used his fingers to manipulate the canvas and its wealth of malleable onyx oil paint, pulling its multiple apertures apart to form extended gouges in the surface. These holes in particular show Fontana's complex interaction with his work: the conversion of a painting into a three-dimensional sculptural object allows the artist the ability both to desecrate and to celebrate the very material that comprises Concetto spaziale. Fontana has deliberately taken great pains to emphasize the material and gestural qualities of the painter’s art. And, it is through this gestural play of intuition and feeling with the material substance of the paint itself that Fontana’s works reveal and display the art and act of painting at its most basic and essential level: as a magical interaction between the idealistic and spiritual will of man with inert but pliable matter. The penetration and transmutation of matter by the coming together of the immaterial spirit and drive of man’s intellect. ‘As a painter, while working on one of my perforated canvases I do not want to make a painting’ he said, ‘I want to open up space, create a new dimension for art, tie in with the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture. With my innovation of the hole pierced through the canvas in repetitive formations, I have not attempted to decorate a surface, but on the contrary; I have tried to break its dimensional limitations. Beyond the perforations, a newly gained freedom of interpretations awaits us, but also, and just as inevitably, the end of art’ (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti (eds.), Fontana, Brussels 1974, p.7).
In Fontana's Concetto spaziale, he takes this concept further, replacing the raw canvas with a densely laden, oil paint-hewn surface in which he aimed to incorporate the sumptuous, malleable quality of the traditional medium of oil paint into his 'Spatialist' aesthetic. The olii took the artist's trademark punctured and slashed canvases in an entirely new and highly textural direction, their visceral perforations emphasise the transmutation of solid matter into the nothingness of space. For Fontana, the dawning of the Space age had rendered all matter and the art object in particular - the painting or the sculpture - obsolete. Only a year before Concetto spaziale was created, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made his epic voyage in the Vostok 1, becoming the first human being to journey into outer space. This achievement marked the first moment that a person was able to look at the planet Earth hanging suspended in the abyss of space. The pitch black surface of Concetto spaziale not only reflects Fontana’s concepts, put it perfectly encapsulates the dark nothingness of space. Man had never left the atmosphere before, and this newfound awareness of our spatial context marked a massive shift in perspective. Suddenly the cosmos was opened as a new dimension to humanity, beginning of an era of infinite potential.
Fontana pioneered the concept of Spazialismo, a radical revision of the purposes of cultural production that advocated 'art based on the unity of time and space' (Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 116). Turning away from the materialism of his recent sculptural practice, Fontana began to investigate the possibilities of raw materials, no longer using the canvas as an illustrative carrier of meaning but as an active catalyst in the definition of space. In this project, Fontana was deeply engaged with the geopolitical context of the new Nuclear age, characterised by advances in quantum physics and pioneering space exploration. In a stunningly simple yet innovative gesture, Fontana replaced painting with bucchi (holes) or tagli (cuts) opening up a two dimensional canvas into a third plane, disrupting the illusion of the flat surface and exposing it to the concept of 'beyond': a process that was to define his oeuvre.
While Fontana’s ‘Spatialist Manifesto’ declared the painted canvas obsolete, in Concetto spaziale and his other olii works, we see him intensely interacting with the material aspects of painting. The Informel that had influenced and run parallel to Fontana's developments and discoveries in the immediate post-War period here finds itself in a new guise, holding hands with the Baroque. This unlikely union results in the peculiar yet potent visual energy that defines so many of the Olii: a resounding tension links on the one hand the gleaming finish afforded by the sumptuous paint, and on the other hand, the raw expression and actions that show Fontana's own exuberant enjoyment of the act of painterly creation itself. Yet ultimately, in playing with these materials, in piercing them and swirling them, Fontana is not only celebrating them, but is also pointing to their own limitations, balancing the implied mortality of paint, canvas and, by extension, painter with the eternal nature of the gestures of creation and the eternal nature of the sculpted space that is embedded within Concetto spaziale. It is this gesture and this creation of a void within the canvas that is so fundamental to his Spatialist theory. By creating multiple perforations that emphasise the contrast between material and the void, Fontana furnishes a new relationship with the work through its meditation not only on space, but on movement, temporality and the notion of the eternal as well.
In Concetto spaziale, the artist has used his fingers to manipulate the canvas and its wealth of malleable onyx oil paint, pulling its multiple apertures apart to form extended gouges in the surface. These holes in particular show Fontana's complex interaction with his work: the conversion of a painting into a three-dimensional sculptural object allows the artist the ability both to desecrate and to celebrate the very material that comprises Concetto spaziale. Fontana has deliberately taken great pains to emphasize the material and gestural qualities of the painter’s art. And, it is through this gestural play of intuition and feeling with the material substance of the paint itself that Fontana’s works reveal and display the art and act of painting at its most basic and essential level: as a magical interaction between the idealistic and spiritual will of man with inert but pliable matter. The penetration and transmutation of matter by the coming together of the immaterial spirit and drive of man’s intellect. ‘As a painter, while working on one of my perforated canvases I do not want to make a painting’ he said, ‘I want to open up space, create a new dimension for art, tie in with the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture. With my innovation of the hole pierced through the canvas in repetitive formations, I have not attempted to decorate a surface, but on the contrary; I have tried to break its dimensional limitations. Beyond the perforations, a newly gained freedom of interpretations awaits us, but also, and just as inevitably, the end of art’ (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti (eds.), Fontana, Brussels 1974, p.7).