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Lot Essay
Executed in 1962, Concetto spaziale bears the unmistakable mark that Lucio Fontana would later declare his single greatest artistic accomplishment. Perforated by one, intimate hole at the centre of the composition, the gleaming mauve-grey canvas forms part of the artist’s distinguished Olii series of the early 1960s. First establishing the hole as his pioneering method of expression in 1949 with twinkling proliferations of Buchi, canvases adorned with constellations of nicks and scratches, the Olii works convey a distinctly material exploration within his career-defining Spazialismo. In a deeply evocative gesture, Fontana’s incision through the surface of his canvas marks an irrevocable breach to the historic boundaries of painting. Around it, he weaves lightly scored traces of a mesmeric, orbiting line in the thick oil-coated surface. Breaking the frontier of the art object to reveal an uncharted spatial dimension beyond the pictorial plane, Fontana’s work explodes with cataclysmic potential, dissolving the partitions between painting and sculpture, destruction and creation, oblivion and infinity.
Appearing as though ruptured by a bullet, the canvas’ flat surface is violently disrupted. Using thickly applied layers of oil during this period to generate extraordinary plasticity and texture, the deep wound seems to congeal at the edges where accretions of molten, impasto paint form a fleshy ridge. Just a year earlier in 1961, Soviet-born astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel to space in his spacecraft Vostok 1. In a ground-breaking venture that signified a new dawn of human exploration and the breaking of Earth’s spatial bounds, Fontana’s work of this time takes on new significance. Captivated by vivid imaginations of these astronautical feats, Fontana reflected on his Olii works: ‘They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin…’ (L. Fontana quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London 1999, p. 44).
Fine, spindly grooves encircle and trail around the dark hole in a tangle of knots, masterfully contradicting violence and enchanting fragility. Scoring and tracing into the soft, slow-drying layers with a sharp tool, Fontana relays his sculptural proclivity in a technique akin to direct carving or copperplate engraving. Indeed, a year earlier Fontana had started experimenting with sheets of metal – copper, zinc, aluminium and brass – scratching their surfaces to create intricately textured reliefs. Exploring the more supple malleability of his medium in the Olii of the early 1960s, the present work also speaks to Fontana’s early sculptural endeavours in terracotta and plaster. Driven by this tactile impulse, after making the initial puncture to the canvas, Fontana would often use his fingers and hands to prise the aperture open in an intimate, faintly erotic gesture. The method relates to his bronze Nature series of 1959-60 where, modelling similarly slashed seed-like pods from terracotta clay, the artist recalled his ‘desire to make the inert material live’ (L. Fontana quoted in E. Crispolti, Fontana. Catalogo generale, Milan 1986, p. 22). In the present canvas this desire is undoubtedly achieved. Rejecting centuries of aesthetic discourse since the Renaissance that drove painting towards a convincing illusion of spatial depth, Fontana’s work radically literalises this very dimension with astonishing force.
Appearing as though ruptured by a bullet, the canvas’ flat surface is violently disrupted. Using thickly applied layers of oil during this period to generate extraordinary plasticity and texture, the deep wound seems to congeal at the edges where accretions of molten, impasto paint form a fleshy ridge. Just a year earlier in 1961, Soviet-born astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel to space in his spacecraft Vostok 1. In a ground-breaking venture that signified a new dawn of human exploration and the breaking of Earth’s spatial bounds, Fontana’s work of this time takes on new significance. Captivated by vivid imaginations of these astronautical feats, Fontana reflected on his Olii works: ‘They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin…’ (L. Fontana quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London 1999, p. 44).
Fine, spindly grooves encircle and trail around the dark hole in a tangle of knots, masterfully contradicting violence and enchanting fragility. Scoring and tracing into the soft, slow-drying layers with a sharp tool, Fontana relays his sculptural proclivity in a technique akin to direct carving or copperplate engraving. Indeed, a year earlier Fontana had started experimenting with sheets of metal – copper, zinc, aluminium and brass – scratching their surfaces to create intricately textured reliefs. Exploring the more supple malleability of his medium in the Olii of the early 1960s, the present work also speaks to Fontana’s early sculptural endeavours in terracotta and plaster. Driven by this tactile impulse, after making the initial puncture to the canvas, Fontana would often use his fingers and hands to prise the aperture open in an intimate, faintly erotic gesture. The method relates to his bronze Nature series of 1959-60 where, modelling similarly slashed seed-like pods from terracotta clay, the artist recalled his ‘desire to make the inert material live’ (L. Fontana quoted in E. Crispolti, Fontana. Catalogo generale, Milan 1986, p. 22). In the present canvas this desire is undoubtedly achieved. Rejecting centuries of aesthetic discourse since the Renaissance that drove painting towards a convincing illusion of spatial depth, Fontana’s work radically literalises this very dimension with astonishing force.