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Lot Essay
Three slashes—the signature marks of Lucio Fontana’s tagli (or ‘cut’) paintings—interrupt the warm, saturated expanse of red canvas. Here, a single, followed by a pair of straight parallel lines, are incised into the surface of the canvas, formed when Fontana took a sharp blade to the painting’s surface. The gentle curling in upon themselves of these marks hints at a mysterious space behind and beyond it. Fontana called these paintings Concetti spaziali, attese or “spatial concepts, expectations.” As “spatial concepts,” Fontana literally and figuratively opened up the two dimensional surfaces to have three dimensional resonance with sculpture. As “expectations,” Fontana aligned them his the anxious act of waiting for an event to occur in the future, giving his paintings a temporal aspect. But what is Fontana expecting or waiting for? They key may be held in the “White Manifesto,” penned in 1946 by Fontana while living in Buenos Aires, evading the horrors of WWII and Mussolini in his native Italy. In reaction to the technological advancements of the war-era, Fontana wrote the White Manifesto to hasten in a new form of art-making that synthesized the arts with the sciences, updated to the advancements of his time. He wrote: “We are living in the era of mechanics. Already painted and the plaster figure no longer make sense. We are abandoning the use of known forms of art and we are initiating the development of an art based on the unity of time and space. Matter, color and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development is an integral part of the new art. The new art demands the functioning of all the energies of man in creation and interpretation. The Being manifests itself integrally, with the plenitude of its vitality” (L. Fontana, “White Manifesto,” Buenos Aires, 1946; republished in Milan, 1966, n.p.).
Fontana’s Concetti spaziali, attese paintings followed his Ambiente Spaziale, “spatial environments,” in which the artist constructed installations of fluorescent light and ultraviolet paint, decorated with materials like glitter and mirrors that would refract and reflect light across the room and behind his paintings. Fontana aimed to push the boundary of a work of art into the space that surrounds it, and thus, he was one of the first artists to create artworks as environments, anticipating developments in site-specific installations and institutional critique that would dominant contemporary art after him. As the art critic Lawrence Alloway noted in 1961, “Some of the ways in which [Fontana] ignores the borders of painting and sculpture, and of the fine and the applied arts, are: ... odd-shaped stretchers which explode or implode the customary rectangle; ceramic chips and metal paints which give the surface a sculptural solidity; and various punctures and cuts which create space literally, by opening up a painted surface” (L. Alloway, “Man on the Border,” in Lucio Fontana: Ten Paintings of Venice, New York, 1961, n.p.).
For his exhibition at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the artist presented a selection of forty paintings, each marked by punctures rather than brushstrokes. Punctured holes became slashes and gashes in 1958. With the gesture of the cut across the otherwise pristine surface of the monochrome, Fontana destroyed the painting’s capacity to hold an image, while opening up to its potential as sculpture. Art critic Sidney Tillmans described Fontana’s paintings in 1961 as “smash your fist through this mirror of inhibition toying with a man’s illusion that he can be free (of the limits of time, space and death)” (S. Tillim, “Lucio Fontana,” Arts Magazine 36, no. 4, 1962, p. 37). Tillman’s words echoes Fontana’s goals to break free from the limitations of art—including the canvas as a boundary that holds the painting, and the gallery wall as a container for the work of art—in creating a new form for a new world.
In the context of the drips and swirls of Jackson Pollock’s action painting in the United States, as well as the expressive materialism of the Arte Informel across in Europe of the same time, Fontana’s cuts can be understood as another kind of “gesture” painting. Art historian Anthony White has written on the gestural aspects of Fontana’s paintings: “From the time of his earliest punctured paintings in the early 1950s, the machine-gun appearance of Fontana’s individual marks had refused the subtle differentiations in handling made possible by the paintbrush, distancing his work from that of the gestural painters. The same holds for the Cuts: in opposition to the virtuoso performance of self-expression, any sign of inspired creation is extremely attenuated by Fontana’s allover layer of monochrome paint, which betrays almost no trace of painterly application… Fontana’s Cuts the unyielding, metallic edge of the Stanley knife blade neatly split the canvas fabric with an action similar to a device such as a guillotine, inhibiting the complex inflections of traditional painterly technique. Although retaining the outward form of the gesture, the artist reduced it to a mechanical operation, undermining the cult of individuality in painting and allowing machine-like attributes to infiltrate gesture painting’s rhetoric. In so doing, Fontana proposed that such art, far from being in opposition to industrial society, was mechanical in its very essence” (A. White, “Industrial Painting’s Utopias: Lucio Fontana’s “Expectations” October, Vol. 124, Spring, 2008, p. 104).
Fontana often inscribed the back of his canvas with quirky messages that protected the work from forgery as well as functioned as a kind of diary of the artist’s daily life. The inscription on the back of this painting confirms the place and date of its making, the restored house and studio in Comabbio, a small village between two lakes to the northwest of Milan, where Fontana lived between January 1968 and his death in early September of the same year. The inscription reads: “Il lago era morbido e / tranquillo,” “The lake was smooth and quiet,” referring to the Lago di Comabbio, which Fontana could see from his studio window. Although Fontana’s abstractions are ultimately secular, their fierce beauty does commune with a Romantic notion of the sublime, and its attendant feelings of exquisite pleasure, awe and existential pain. There is also a profoundly utopian element in Concetto spaziale, Attese that reflects Fontana’s quest for an art that both acknowledges our metaphysical place in the universe and frees the soul. ‘My tagli are primarily a philosophical expression, an act of faith in the Infinite, an affirmation of spirituality,” Fontana declared. “When I sit down in front of one of my tagli, to contemplate it, I suddenly feel a great expansion of the spirit, I feel like a man liberated from the slavery of material, like a man who belongs to the vastness of the present and the future” (L. Fontana, quoted in G. Livi, ‘Incontro con Lucio Fontana’, Vanità, Vol. 6, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 56).
Fontana’s Concetti spaziali, attese paintings followed his Ambiente Spaziale, “spatial environments,” in which the artist constructed installations of fluorescent light and ultraviolet paint, decorated with materials like glitter and mirrors that would refract and reflect light across the room and behind his paintings. Fontana aimed to push the boundary of a work of art into the space that surrounds it, and thus, he was one of the first artists to create artworks as environments, anticipating developments in site-specific installations and institutional critique that would dominant contemporary art after him. As the art critic Lawrence Alloway noted in 1961, “Some of the ways in which [Fontana] ignores the borders of painting and sculpture, and of the fine and the applied arts, are: ... odd-shaped stretchers which explode or implode the customary rectangle; ceramic chips and metal paints which give the surface a sculptural solidity; and various punctures and cuts which create space literally, by opening up a painted surface” (L. Alloway, “Man on the Border,” in Lucio Fontana: Ten Paintings of Venice, New York, 1961, n.p.).
For his exhibition at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the artist presented a selection of forty paintings, each marked by punctures rather than brushstrokes. Punctured holes became slashes and gashes in 1958. With the gesture of the cut across the otherwise pristine surface of the monochrome, Fontana destroyed the painting’s capacity to hold an image, while opening up to its potential as sculpture. Art critic Sidney Tillmans described Fontana’s paintings in 1961 as “smash your fist through this mirror of inhibition toying with a man’s illusion that he can be free (of the limits of time, space and death)” (S. Tillim, “Lucio Fontana,” Arts Magazine 36, no. 4, 1962, p. 37). Tillman’s words echoes Fontana’s goals to break free from the limitations of art—including the canvas as a boundary that holds the painting, and the gallery wall as a container for the work of art—in creating a new form for a new world.
In the context of the drips and swirls of Jackson Pollock’s action painting in the United States, as well as the expressive materialism of the Arte Informel across in Europe of the same time, Fontana’s cuts can be understood as another kind of “gesture” painting. Art historian Anthony White has written on the gestural aspects of Fontana’s paintings: “From the time of his earliest punctured paintings in the early 1950s, the machine-gun appearance of Fontana’s individual marks had refused the subtle differentiations in handling made possible by the paintbrush, distancing his work from that of the gestural painters. The same holds for the Cuts: in opposition to the virtuoso performance of self-expression, any sign of inspired creation is extremely attenuated by Fontana’s allover layer of monochrome paint, which betrays almost no trace of painterly application… Fontana’s Cuts the unyielding, metallic edge of the Stanley knife blade neatly split the canvas fabric with an action similar to a device such as a guillotine, inhibiting the complex inflections of traditional painterly technique. Although retaining the outward form of the gesture, the artist reduced it to a mechanical operation, undermining the cult of individuality in painting and allowing machine-like attributes to infiltrate gesture painting’s rhetoric. In so doing, Fontana proposed that such art, far from being in opposition to industrial society, was mechanical in its very essence” (A. White, “Industrial Painting’s Utopias: Lucio Fontana’s “Expectations” October, Vol. 124, Spring, 2008, p. 104).
Fontana often inscribed the back of his canvas with quirky messages that protected the work from forgery as well as functioned as a kind of diary of the artist’s daily life. The inscription on the back of this painting confirms the place and date of its making, the restored house and studio in Comabbio, a small village between two lakes to the northwest of Milan, where Fontana lived between January 1968 and his death in early September of the same year. The inscription reads: “Il lago era morbido e / tranquillo,” “The lake was smooth and quiet,” referring to the Lago di Comabbio, which Fontana could see from his studio window. Although Fontana’s abstractions are ultimately secular, their fierce beauty does commune with a Romantic notion of the sublime, and its attendant feelings of exquisite pleasure, awe and existential pain. There is also a profoundly utopian element in Concetto spaziale, Attese that reflects Fontana’s quest for an art that both acknowledges our metaphysical place in the universe and frees the soul. ‘My tagli are primarily a philosophical expression, an act of faith in the Infinite, an affirmation of spirituality,” Fontana declared. “When I sit down in front of one of my tagli, to contemplate it, I suddenly feel a great expansion of the spirit, I feel like a man liberated from the slavery of material, like a man who belongs to the vastness of the present and the future” (L. Fontana, quoted in G. Livi, ‘Incontro con Lucio Fontana’, Vanità, Vol. 6, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 56).