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Lot Essay
‘If any of my discoveries are important, the “hole” is … I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else’
–Lucio Fontana
‘Art is eternal but it cannot be immortal; … it may live for a year or for millennia, but the time of its material destruction will always come: it will remain eternal as a gesture’
–Lucio Fontana
With its vivid scarlet surface punctured by an ovular arrangement of holes, Concetto spaziale stems from Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary series of buchi (‘holes’). Executed between 1966 and 1967, the work’s central formation echoes the egg-shaped canvases of the artist’s iconic cycle Fine di Dio (‘The End of God’), created just three years previously. Initiated in 1949, the dynamic, rhythmic gestures of the buchi were the breakthrough manifestation of Fontana’s ‘Spatialist’ theories, pre-dating the tagli or ‘slashes’ that he began in the late 1950s. Disrupting the long-cherished notion of the picture plane as a setting for an illusory representation of life, these piercing acts opened the canvas as a vehicle for philosophical and intellectual contemplation. For Fontana, the dawn of the Space Age in the twentieth century marked the beginning of an entirely new era in the evolution of man: an age in which the artist, like the scientist, would now have to adapt to a vision of the world constituted by time, matter, energy and above all, space. As man had broken through the Earth’s atmospheric barrier, revealing the cosmos as a new, unexplored dimension, the buchi literally opened the canvas to expose the infinite space beyond its flat, material surface. As the artist has explained, his perforations were neither destructive nor nihilistic, but fundamentally creative. ‘If any of my discoveries are important, the “hole” is’, he asserted. ‘… I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else’ (L. Fontana, quoted in T. Trini, ‘The last interview given by Fontana’, in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1988, p. 34).
For Fontana, the organic form of the egg was a powerful symbol: one of harmony and fundamental order, of the cyclical passage of life, death and resurrection, and of the unknowable, unfathomable unity of the universe. ‘My art is directed towards this purity’, he explained, ‘it is based on the philosophy of nothingness, a nothingness that does not imply destruction, but a nothingness of creation’ (L. Fontana, quoted in ‘Interview with Carla Lonzi’, 10 October 1967, reproduced in Lucio Fontana, Sedici sculture 1937-67, exh. cat., Amedeo Porro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Milan, 2007, p. 35). Following the tenets of his Spatialist theories, Fontana’s work would come to occupy a new space between painting and sculpture. In Concetto Spaziale, the black space of the buchi and the raised and recessed remnants of puncture create a multi-dimensional topography, resembling constellations of stars set against the never-ending cosmos. Each hole fixes the energised transformative act of its creation to a specific point in time and space. Paradoxically, this temporal dimension infuses the work with a sense of the eternal: despite the ultimate transience of material canvas, the space, once opened, will exist forever. ‘Art is eternal but it cannot be immortal’, Fontana asserted in the First Spatialist Manifesto. ‘… it may live for a year or for millennia, but the time of its material destruction will always come: it will remain eternal as a gesture’ (L. Fontana, quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 20).
–Lucio Fontana
‘Art is eternal but it cannot be immortal; … it may live for a year or for millennia, but the time of its material destruction will always come: it will remain eternal as a gesture’
–Lucio Fontana
With its vivid scarlet surface punctured by an ovular arrangement of holes, Concetto spaziale stems from Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary series of buchi (‘holes’). Executed between 1966 and 1967, the work’s central formation echoes the egg-shaped canvases of the artist’s iconic cycle Fine di Dio (‘The End of God’), created just three years previously. Initiated in 1949, the dynamic, rhythmic gestures of the buchi were the breakthrough manifestation of Fontana’s ‘Spatialist’ theories, pre-dating the tagli or ‘slashes’ that he began in the late 1950s. Disrupting the long-cherished notion of the picture plane as a setting for an illusory representation of life, these piercing acts opened the canvas as a vehicle for philosophical and intellectual contemplation. For Fontana, the dawn of the Space Age in the twentieth century marked the beginning of an entirely new era in the evolution of man: an age in which the artist, like the scientist, would now have to adapt to a vision of the world constituted by time, matter, energy and above all, space. As man had broken through the Earth’s atmospheric barrier, revealing the cosmos as a new, unexplored dimension, the buchi literally opened the canvas to expose the infinite space beyond its flat, material surface. As the artist has explained, his perforations were neither destructive nor nihilistic, but fundamentally creative. ‘If any of my discoveries are important, the “hole” is’, he asserted. ‘… I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else’ (L. Fontana, quoted in T. Trini, ‘The last interview given by Fontana’, in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1988, p. 34).
For Fontana, the organic form of the egg was a powerful symbol: one of harmony and fundamental order, of the cyclical passage of life, death and resurrection, and of the unknowable, unfathomable unity of the universe. ‘My art is directed towards this purity’, he explained, ‘it is based on the philosophy of nothingness, a nothingness that does not imply destruction, but a nothingness of creation’ (L. Fontana, quoted in ‘Interview with Carla Lonzi’, 10 October 1967, reproduced in Lucio Fontana, Sedici sculture 1937-67, exh. cat., Amedeo Porro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Milan, 2007, p. 35). Following the tenets of his Spatialist theories, Fontana’s work would come to occupy a new space between painting and sculpture. In Concetto Spaziale, the black space of the buchi and the raised and recessed remnants of puncture create a multi-dimensional topography, resembling constellations of stars set against the never-ending cosmos. Each hole fixes the energised transformative act of its creation to a specific point in time and space. Paradoxically, this temporal dimension infuses the work with a sense of the eternal: despite the ultimate transience of material canvas, the space, once opened, will exist forever. ‘Art is eternal but it cannot be immortal’, Fontana asserted in the First Spatialist Manifesto. ‘… it may live for a year or for millennia, but the time of its material destruction will always come: it will remain eternal as a gesture’ (L. Fontana, quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 20).