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Lot Essay
Concetto spaziale dates from the very beginning of Fontana's use of what would become one of the key and iconic weapons in his Spatialist arsenal: the hole. The earliest of these date from 1949, making this one of the works from a trailblazing period. It was following Fontana's return from Argentina in 1947, where he had been teaching since 1940, that the concepts of Spatialism truly crystallised. Already in Buenos Aires, he had participated in the publication of the Manifesto Blanco which, while not signed by him, clearly contained many distillations of his own ideas and would become a progenitor of sorts for the Spatial Manifestoes that would be published in 1947 and 1948. This Spatialism was increasingly evident in large-scale architectural projects that used space and light, the modern, ineffable media of the age of science and speed, as constituent parts in their own rights. Concetto spaziale uses these same media in a more domestic scale, and has the added benefit of artistic intervention, of the gesture of each moment as Fontana pierces the canvas, opening up the traditional support of Western painting in a new and fantastic way. This opening is all the more vivid in Concetto spaziale because of Fontana's use of raw canvas. He has avoided paint, avoided colour. They are superfluous. All Fontana needs are the holes, which create a play of light, introduce the three-dimensionality of the canvas, carve out areas in raw space and also, in their configuration, hint at an interplay between order and chaos.
There is an eloquent simplicity to the concept of the hole, and visually, Concetto spaziale seems suited indeed to the rocket era that the West was now entering and that Fontana was addressing. He was viewing the world from a new angle--
"... beyond perspective... the discovery of the cosmos is a new dimension, it is infinity, so I make a hole in this canvas, which was at the basis of all the arts and I have created an infinite dimension... the idea is precisely that, it is a new dimension corresponding to the cosmos... The hole is, precisely, creating this void behind there... Einstein's discovery of the cosmos is the infinite dimension, without end. And so here we have: foreground, middleground and background... to go farther what do I have to do?... I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint" (Fontana quoted in E. Crispolti, 'Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties', pp. 144-150 in, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Milan 1998, p. 146).
There is an eloquent simplicity to the concept of the hole, and visually, Concetto spaziale seems suited indeed to the rocket era that the West was now entering and that Fontana was addressing. He was viewing the world from a new angle--
"... beyond perspective... the discovery of the cosmos is a new dimension, it is infinity, so I make a hole in this canvas, which was at the basis of all the arts and I have created an infinite dimension... the idea is precisely that, it is a new dimension corresponding to the cosmos... The hole is, precisely, creating this void behind there... Einstein's discovery of the cosmos is the infinite dimension, without end. And so here we have: foreground, middleground and background... to go farther what do I have to do?... I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint" (Fontana quoted in E. Crispolti, 'Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties', pp. 144-150 in, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Milan 1998, p. 146).