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Lot Essay
‘The taglio is an act of faith in Infinity’
LUCIO FONTANA
‘I make these cuts and these holes, these Attese and these Concetti … I made these holes. But what are they? They are the mystery of the Unknown in art, they are the Expectation of something that must follow’
LUCIO FONTANA
‘When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future’
LUCIO FONTANA
With a single vertical slash penetrating its vivid red surface, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attesa of 1967 is a concise, jewel-like example of his tagli or ‘cuts’. Piercing the very fibre of the canvas to reveal the uncharted void beyond, these works represent the most important realisation of his ground-breaking Spatialist theories. Inspired by the scientific advances of the Space Age, Fontana sought to create a revolutionary art form equipped to translate the newly-discovered dimensions of the cosmos. Incising the canvas with a singular sweep of his knife, the artist gave birth to a visual language rooted in space, movement, time and energy: elements whose properties had been wholly redefined by man’s exploration of the universe. ‘As a painter,’ he said, ‘while working on one of my perforated canvases, I do not want to make a painting: 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’ (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels 1974, p. 7). Attese translates as ‘waiting:’ the slashes preserve a momentary gesture for a far-flung future, the new existence that Fontana anticipated for man in the universe. In these works, he found a meditative vehicle for existential freedom. ‘When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit’, he asserted; ‘I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future’ (L. Fontana quoted in L. M. Barbero, ‘Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York’ in L. M. Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006, p. 23). This effect is heightened by the present work’s intimate scale: like looking through a telescope, the delicate incision functions as a gateway to the vast dimensions of the cosmos.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, theories of modern physics shook the very foundation of the way man perceived himself in the universe. Fontana was fascinated by recent technological advancements that showed space as an indeterminate void without confines or external points of reference. He felt it essential to change art’s nature and form in order to match the spirit of the time, and in 1946, Fontana, along with other avant-garde artists in Buenos Aires, published the Manifesto Blanco, postulating that ‘we abandon the practice of known art forms and we approach the development of an art based on the unity of time and space’ (L. Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, 1946, reproduced in R. Fuchs, Lucio Fontana: La cultura dell’occhio, exh. cat., Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, 1986, p. 80). By piercing the canvas, initially through his series of buchi (‘holes’) and subsequently through his tagli, Fontana united temporal and spatial phenomena, creating a language grounded in the gestural act and its physical residue. For the artist, the capturing of movement in art was the last frontier – one that had only become conceptually possible in light of recent scientific advancements. The canvas was no longer simply a support: it was a space in which invisible energetic forces collided to create a new, multi-dimensional object. ‘I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them’, the artist explained; ‘there is no need to paint’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, ‘Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties’, in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 146).
LUCIO FONTANA
‘I make these cuts and these holes, these Attese and these Concetti … I made these holes. But what are they? They are the mystery of the Unknown in art, they are the Expectation of something that must follow’
LUCIO FONTANA
‘When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future’
LUCIO FONTANA
With a single vertical slash penetrating its vivid red surface, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attesa of 1967 is a concise, jewel-like example of his tagli or ‘cuts’. Piercing the very fibre of the canvas to reveal the uncharted void beyond, these works represent the most important realisation of his ground-breaking Spatialist theories. Inspired by the scientific advances of the Space Age, Fontana sought to create a revolutionary art form equipped to translate the newly-discovered dimensions of the cosmos. Incising the canvas with a singular sweep of his knife, the artist gave birth to a visual language rooted in space, movement, time and energy: elements whose properties had been wholly redefined by man’s exploration of the universe. ‘As a painter,’ he said, ‘while working on one of my perforated canvases, I do not want to make a painting: 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’ (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels 1974, p. 7). Attese translates as ‘waiting:’ the slashes preserve a momentary gesture for a far-flung future, the new existence that Fontana anticipated for man in the universe. In these works, he found a meditative vehicle for existential freedom. ‘When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit’, he asserted; ‘I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future’ (L. Fontana quoted in L. M. Barbero, ‘Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York’ in L. M. Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006, p. 23). This effect is heightened by the present work’s intimate scale: like looking through a telescope, the delicate incision functions as a gateway to the vast dimensions of the cosmos.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, theories of modern physics shook the very foundation of the way man perceived himself in the universe. Fontana was fascinated by recent technological advancements that showed space as an indeterminate void without confines or external points of reference. He felt it essential to change art’s nature and form in order to match the spirit of the time, and in 1946, Fontana, along with other avant-garde artists in Buenos Aires, published the Manifesto Blanco, postulating that ‘we abandon the practice of known art forms and we approach the development of an art based on the unity of time and space’ (L. Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, 1946, reproduced in R. Fuchs, Lucio Fontana: La cultura dell’occhio, exh. cat., Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, 1986, p. 80). By piercing the canvas, initially through his series of buchi (‘holes’) and subsequently through his tagli, Fontana united temporal and spatial phenomena, creating a language grounded in the gestural act and its physical residue. For the artist, the capturing of movement in art was the last frontier – one that had only become conceptually possible in light of recent scientific advancements. The canvas was no longer simply a support: it was a space in which invisible energetic forces collided to create a new, multi-dimensional object. ‘I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them’, the artist explained; ‘there is no need to paint’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, ‘Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties’, in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 146).