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Lot Essay
‘I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space.’
– Lucio Fontana
‘And the slash, and the holes, the first holes, were not the destruction of the painting… it was a dimension beyond the painting, the freedom to conceive art through any means, through any form. Art is not painting and sculpture alone: art is a creation of man, who can transform it into anything… as is may also end, because such exceptional events will happen… Art will seem to be too elementary: it will be superseded by man’s intelligence and other activities will replace art.’
– Lucio Fontana
With its single, vertical slash confidently extending across the emerald green canvas, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attesa, 1966, is an enthralling conceptual proposition of infinite time and space. 1966 was a triumphal year for Fontana during which he designed costumes and sets for La Scala and his work was included in the 10th Venice Biennale, Concetto spaziale, Attesa is a marvellous articulation of the artist’s innovative practice. The work is firmly situated within Fontana’s tagli, or ‘cut’ series, begun in 1958, which were the purest crystallization of the artist’s thematic and formal interrogations. In contrast with the astral perforations of his earlier buchi, or holes, the tagli are motion incarnated within the flattened space of the pictorial plane. Inscribed on the reverse with ‘ATTESA c’é un bel sole’ (‘WAIT there is a beautiful sun’), the work’s explicit invocation of the sun places it within a distinct group of works Fontana created in response to his travels to Venice and New York in 1961, where he became enchanted by the mystical, unfathomable light that illuminated the cities’ buildings. Despite the work’s poetic inscription, Fontana’s interest was not in the figurative; rather he was fascinated with the phenomenological vision of space, related to both the cosmos and the fourth dimension.
Regarding the violation of the picture plane as a profoundly conceptual act, Fontana evokes the expressive painterly stroke only to empty it of all content. A piercingly thin cut splits the two-dimensional canvas, revealing a slit of dark, seemingly infinite space at the centre. Fontana made the cuts while the paint was still wet, then, once dry, would mould the shape by hand. With this deceptively simple, yet premeditated conceptual act, Fontana introduced a radically new and boundless perspective, painted at the moment of man’s first forays into outer space. ‘We want painting to escape from its frame and sculpture from its bell-jar,’ the artist said, ‘an expression of aerial art of a minute is as if it lasts a thousand years, an eternity’ (L. Fontana, ‘The Second Spatial Manifesto’, in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 118). Concetto spaziale, Attesa is an image of transformation and transcendence: in allowing light to pass through the canvas, it reaches towards the universe.
– Lucio Fontana
‘And the slash, and the holes, the first holes, were not the destruction of the painting… it was a dimension beyond the painting, the freedom to conceive art through any means, through any form. Art is not painting and sculpture alone: art is a creation of man, who can transform it into anything… as is may also end, because such exceptional events will happen… Art will seem to be too elementary: it will be superseded by man’s intelligence and other activities will replace art.’
– Lucio Fontana
With its single, vertical slash confidently extending across the emerald green canvas, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attesa, 1966, is an enthralling conceptual proposition of infinite time and space. 1966 was a triumphal year for Fontana during which he designed costumes and sets for La Scala and his work was included in the 10th Venice Biennale, Concetto spaziale, Attesa is a marvellous articulation of the artist’s innovative practice. The work is firmly situated within Fontana’s tagli, or ‘cut’ series, begun in 1958, which were the purest crystallization of the artist’s thematic and formal interrogations. In contrast with the astral perforations of his earlier buchi, or holes, the tagli are motion incarnated within the flattened space of the pictorial plane. Inscribed on the reverse with ‘ATTESA c’é un bel sole’ (‘WAIT there is a beautiful sun’), the work’s explicit invocation of the sun places it within a distinct group of works Fontana created in response to his travels to Venice and New York in 1961, where he became enchanted by the mystical, unfathomable light that illuminated the cities’ buildings. Despite the work’s poetic inscription, Fontana’s interest was not in the figurative; rather he was fascinated with the phenomenological vision of space, related to both the cosmos and the fourth dimension.
Regarding the violation of the picture plane as a profoundly conceptual act, Fontana evokes the expressive painterly stroke only to empty it of all content. A piercingly thin cut splits the two-dimensional canvas, revealing a slit of dark, seemingly infinite space at the centre. Fontana made the cuts while the paint was still wet, then, once dry, would mould the shape by hand. With this deceptively simple, yet premeditated conceptual act, Fontana introduced a radically new and boundless perspective, painted at the moment of man’s first forays into outer space. ‘We want painting to escape from its frame and sculpture from its bell-jar,’ the artist said, ‘an expression of aerial art of a minute is as if it lasts a thousand years, an eternity’ (L. Fontana, ‘The Second Spatial Manifesto’, in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 118). Concetto spaziale, Attesa is an image of transformation and transcendence: in allowing light to pass through the canvas, it reaches towards the universe.