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Lot Essay
‘What is required is a change in both essence and form. It is necessary to transcend painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. We require a greater art, which will be consistent with the demands of the new spirit’
EXTRACT FROM MANIFESTO BLANCO, 1946
‘We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: colour, sound, movement, time, space, integrated in physical and mental union. Colour, the element of space; sound, the element of time and movement, which develops in time and space. These are fundamental to the new art which encompasses the four dimensions of existence. Time and space. The new art requires that all of man’s energies be used productively in creation and interpretation. Existence is shown in an integrated manner, with all its vitality. Colour Sound Movement’
EXTRACT FROM MANIFESTO BLANCO, 1946
So Fontana commented about his Attese (Expectations) - the slashed paintings also entitled ‘spatial concepts’ for which he is perhaps best known. When Fontana first punctured the two-dimensional plane of the canvas in the early 1950s, his aim was to open up, this traditional two-dimensional support for illusionistic representation to the new infinite dimension of space. It was a simultaneously destructive and creative act that Fontana intended to mark the genesis of what he called a new ‘Spatial’ art: an art that would both express and contain within it an implicit understanding of the cosmic space as an infinite dimension and new material of art.
Amongst all of Fontana’s wide range of creations and ‘spatial concepts’ the Attese remain the simplest, most elegant and powerful expressions of this aim. Like so many of the artist’s works they mark Fontana’s liberation from a dimension-filled universe and signify his intention of operating creatively within the context of an infinite one. Indeed, so identifiable with the core ideology and aesthetic of Fontana’s art are the Attese, and so popular did they prove, that the artist continued to make them on a regular basis throughout the last ten years of his life.
Simple, minimal, ‘spatialist’ gestures consisting solely of a pure monochrome coloured canvas opening onto infinite space through the elegant slash or slashes perforating the surface, Fontana’s Attese were works that marked a break from the artist’s earlier informel experiment with material and, in their adoption of the monochrome, the beginning of a new more purely conceptual direction for his Spatialist adventure. Evolving from Fontana’s concept of the buchi or hole in the canvas, the distinctly more elegant slash symbolized Fontana’s concept of the creative act being an eternal gesture. While, with time, the material aspect of a work of art will decay and fade away, the immaterial act or gesture of puncturing this material and impregnating it with a spatial sensitivity was one that Fontana would live forever in the space-time continuum. ‘Art is eternal as a gesture,’ he declared in his first Spatialist manifesto, ‘but it will die as matter ... What we want to do is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal.’ What we want to do’ Fontana asserted, ‘is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal’ (‘First Spatialist Manifesto’, 1947, signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh.cat., Rome, 1998, pp. 117-18).
EXTRACT FROM MANIFESTO BLANCO, 1946
‘We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: colour, sound, movement, time, space, integrated in physical and mental union. Colour, the element of space; sound, the element of time and movement, which develops in time and space. These are fundamental to the new art which encompasses the four dimensions of existence. Time and space. The new art requires that all of man’s energies be used productively in creation and interpretation. Existence is shown in an integrated manner, with all its vitality. Colour Sound Movement’
EXTRACT FROM MANIFESTO BLANCO, 1946
So Fontana commented about his Attese (Expectations) - the slashed paintings also entitled ‘spatial concepts’ for which he is perhaps best known. When Fontana first punctured the two-dimensional plane of the canvas in the early 1950s, his aim was to open up, this traditional two-dimensional support for illusionistic representation to the new infinite dimension of space. It was a simultaneously destructive and creative act that Fontana intended to mark the genesis of what he called a new ‘Spatial’ art: an art that would both express and contain within it an implicit understanding of the cosmic space as an infinite dimension and new material of art.
Amongst all of Fontana’s wide range of creations and ‘spatial concepts’ the Attese remain the simplest, most elegant and powerful expressions of this aim. Like so many of the artist’s works they mark Fontana’s liberation from a dimension-filled universe and signify his intention of operating creatively within the context of an infinite one. Indeed, so identifiable with the core ideology and aesthetic of Fontana’s art are the Attese, and so popular did they prove, that the artist continued to make them on a regular basis throughout the last ten years of his life.
Simple, minimal, ‘spatialist’ gestures consisting solely of a pure monochrome coloured canvas opening onto infinite space through the elegant slash or slashes perforating the surface, Fontana’s Attese were works that marked a break from the artist’s earlier informel experiment with material and, in their adoption of the monochrome, the beginning of a new more purely conceptual direction for his Spatialist adventure. Evolving from Fontana’s concept of the buchi or hole in the canvas, the distinctly more elegant slash symbolized Fontana’s concept of the creative act being an eternal gesture. While, with time, the material aspect of a work of art will decay and fade away, the immaterial act or gesture of puncturing this material and impregnating it with a spatial sensitivity was one that Fontana would live forever in the space-time continuum. ‘Art is eternal as a gesture,’ he declared in his first Spatialist manifesto, ‘but it will die as matter ... What we want to do is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal.’ What we want to do’ Fontana asserted, ‘is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal’ (‘First Spatialist Manifesto’, 1947, signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh.cat., Rome, 1998, pp. 117-18).