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The Infinite as a New Subject (Luca Massimo Barbero) The infinite played a central role in Lucio Fontana's research. Within this wide-reaching and changeable term, he strove to recognise not only a place that is as real as it is abstract, but also an absolute concept of space which, through some kind of personal artistic mysticism, can be identified throughout the entire span of his life's work. The material was thus a fundamental means through which - albeit in a transitory manner - the various spatial concepts might be made manifest, and consequently, through its symbolism, the path towards the infinite. From the graphite tables to the wonderful 1930s terracotta sculptures (which critics have as yet not managed to classify as the forerunners of every Informel and material experiment), Fontana worked with each material by graphically modifying it in an almost telluric fashion. The material was the zone which initiated the reflection and the sudden and premeditated gesture, the suspended and dimensional sign, the artist's actions which transformed the object into a dynamic and conceptual space. It was only in the late 1940s that any clarity, or even theoretical explanations, was achieved regarding his unique and original path. From 1946 onwards, some of his abstract drawings bore the title Concetto spaziale, and in the following year he began studies for the very first environments which were destined to usher in the first post-war Ambiente spaziale with black light in 1949. That same year also heralded the birth of one of the cardinal emblems of the new avant-garde movement destined to make its mark on the art of that epoch and right up to the present day: the Buchi. 'The work of art is not eternal, time holds the existence of man and its creation; once man is no more, the infinite continues.' Lucio Fontana. 'The discovery of the Cosmos,' said Fontana, 'is a new dimension, it is the infinite: so when I pierce this canvas, which was basic to all the arts, then I have created an infinite dimension, an X that for me is at the very base of all of Contemporary Art'[1]. Whilst sometimes interpreted as being a purely destructive gesture, Fontana's Buchi did in fact add a whole new dimension and, at the same time, vanquished the objective limits of the painting. By puncturing the canvas, the artist had not only demolished the constrictions represented by the diaphragm of the canvas over the centuries (which still represented the limit for all contemporary painters at the time), but he also instilled that ambiguity of style and definition that would accompany him throughout his career. The third dimension, together with the fourth dimension of the Infinite, transformed the painting into a plastic and spatial place that was no longer a simple surface animated by pictorial signs. He even asked himself, 'Painter or Sculptor?' The answer can be seen in the huge profusion of papers and meditations from the Manifesti Spazialisti which accompanied the artist and followers of the movement from 1946 until the Fifties. Art as a continuity and evolution of the experience of avant-garde; freedom to invent and an almost Utopian belief in the resources of modern techniques - fascinated by the infinite interpretations of Einstein's theories as much as by the pioneering revelations of the exploration of the Cosmos, Fontana identified cosmic space as having a possible geographical location in his own Infinite. The awe-inspiring wonder of the galaxies, the brut and unknown material of the celestial bodies, and also the gaseous mutability of the stellar vortexes, all fascinated him and fully corresponded to his theory that a new art must be able to reference new spaces and new enigmatic or mysterious subject matters. If the first Buchi were made on prevalently monochrome surfaces between 1946 and 1950, the drawings from those years and then the canvases from the following years all show evidence of constellations, chunks of matter, mutant vortexes and galaxies of punctures. The earliest canvases were also used as screens for luminous projections and to prepare new immaterial works for the then experimental television which interested the artist, confirming his place in the vanguard of new artistic expression. At the same time, and confirming his natural role as a Creative Centre who affected and was implicated in every artistic field and every material substance, Fontana produced terracotta sculptures, perforating and marking the surface. The Sculture spaziali of the early 1950s - and on this occasion Concetto spaziale 51-52 SC3 - embodied what Crispolti referred to as the 'eminently gestural nature of the very (irreversible) action of puncturing,'[2] and are the expression of a new paroxysm of the sign and of the holes typical of this period. In the terracotta sculptures (and also in some of the metal Concetto spaziale from the early Fifties), the hole was sometimes made by striking the material from the wrong side, from behind, so that the material was pushed out, resulting in an agitated aperture that symbolised the passage of the new dimension, while also generating shadows and plastic volume. The disrupted surface as a symbol or a metaphor for the passage of the material was also a central element in many of the Ambiente spaziale conceived during those particularly active and fervent years. Thus, in the canvases between 1952 and 1953 such as Concetto spaziale 53 P 12, as well as slashing the canvas, Fontana made a gestural contribution with the oil paint which was intense and obvious, yet always interpretable as a spatial element and never as a graphic one. This element was necessary for the construction of the Concetto spaziale to be understood as being a total and dynamic space. As well as colour, fragments of vitreous paste were added which, together with the slashes, created an infinite complexity and a new zone of allusion. The unknown space of Fontana's Cosmos was enriched with new material, with polychrome shadows, opaque and transparent colours which almost seemed to come from unknown bodies. Spatialism had reached a point of maturation. In 1952, the Venice Biennale formally recognised the value of Fontana's artistic path when they dedicated a personal retrospective to him. Fontana's experience had matured in an incredibly short time, resulting in some outstanding examples from this period. Alongside the Buchi, the Pietre and the architectural works, a new original form underscored the space beyond the hole: the sign with neon lights which he used in this period to create important Ambiente spaziale. A simultaneity of these various levels of research and different means of artistic expression were the cipher of the inexhaustible inventiveness of Lucio Fontana. Always ready to surprise the world by surpassing his most recent achievements, through the absolute and monochromatic sense of the Tagli, Fontana declared his liberation from the magmatic instability of matter. A sense of playful and dramatic freedom spurred him on to outdo his achievements and the resulting works of his maturity by pushing himself further, so as to search for new forms and materials. Towards the middle of the 1950s, Fontana's output investigated multiple forms. The material churned in Baroque vortexes, crisscrossed by slashes and cosmic particles of matter. Fontana's sculptures had already achieved results that anticipated the minimalist lines and the Ambienti spaziali that guaranteed his place as one of the great experimental fathers of contemporary avant-garde art. Half way through the 1950s, the extraordinary works entitled Gessi were born alongside the Inchiostri, and together with the threadlike and phytomorphic sculptures crafted in these years, they represented the artist's creative vitality. At that time, young artists recognized him as being a point of reference, a courageous innovator and a traveller through unknown artistic terrains. The still-young Piero Manzoni wrote of Fontana: 'Lessons in life aptitude, will, the strength to actually create the art and freedom of invention'[3]. Fontana was fifty-eight when Spatialism began to be consistently recognised abroad in a collective manner. In fact, in 1957 the exhibition "Between Space and Earth. Trends in Modern Italian Art" was held at the Marlborough Fine Arts of London, and was followed by the Saõ Paolo Biennal, his great one-man exhibition at the Venice Biennal and various shows in Europe. These were the years of a new and genuine success for the author of these works: at the same time as the rarefied and transparent material of the Inchiostri, the first signs of cutting appeared in 1958. The time for material investigation was already finished and new horizons and spatial visions were opening up. Just as with the very earliest Buchi, it was framed card that bore the vehemence of the first slashes in 1959. Convulsive and apparently cut quite casually with diagonal trajectories, the Tagli were the evolution of the Concetto spaziale of the Buchi, an evolution that Fontana called: 'an affirmation of spirituality.' In the Tagli, the exercise of this spirituality was accompanied by the title Attese which was added to Concetto spaziale. Where the germinal slashes appeared in works where the surface was scored with coloured marks, pastel colours or notches of aniline to give a landscape effect, with a need for the absolute, lacerating the canvas in a haphazard manner immediately resulted in its own quiet and order. The Taglio suddenly involved monochrome surfaces, almost like a chromatic and conceptual return to the purity of its abstract origins and it was always as stark, absolutely incisive and penetrating as it was suspended. The first Concetti spaziali/Attese completed between 1959 and 1960 (see 60T125) really were filled with this sense of the absolute and the slashes, some of which tend to run along the entire length of the canvas, assumed a kind of spatial monumentality with a rhythm and cadence of quiet suspense. Since their inception, the Tagli have been received as the emblematic and encapsulating aspect moment (together with Buchi) of Fontana's output and they coincide with the very first moment when the Maestro began to be celebrated by the international community. Unlike the gesturality and physicality of Buchi, Fontana's Attese represent this absolute stage of concentration and rarefaction where the gesture is identified almost conceptually in the essence of the slash. The gesture irreversibly penetrates the equally mental and essential monochrome surface of the canvas, creating an almost "zen" dimension with the slash a high concentration of thought. 'When I sit down in front of one of my slashes to contemplate it,' admitted the artist, 'I suddenly feel my spirit relax and I feel like a man freed from the slavery of matter; a man who belongs to the vastness of the present and the future.'[5] Thus in its maturity, Fontana's work was untouched by creative fatigue or pure modulation. On the contrary, it regenerated, extended and renewed. The Tagli continued throughout the 1960s until the death of their creator, and represented him in the exhibitions of the Nul and Zero groups and at the international collectives to which critics invited him, recognising him as a forerunner of the movements who would distinguish the new generations of that time. The monochrome surface took on a variety of possibilities and a variety of chromatic ranges where the single and multiple slashes articulated the purity of their creative essential gesture. Over the years Fontana always articulated the rhythm and the presence of the fissures, from where they were situated to how they were executed in the cutting of the canvas. Sometimes the slashes are slightly arched and run close to one another in a fast rhythm while at other times they are so distant that the cut appears to have folded the material towards the internal perspective. In other canvases, the artist created potential diagonal meetings between the multiple slashes which crossed the canvas as though there were a possible almost orthogonal dialogue between them. In some works - always towards the fatally conclusive years of his life - the cuts assumed an ever-more-absolute dimension. Their imperative verticality is almost architectonic. The rhythm is sometimes solemn and vertical, as in 66T143, where the elements plough through the space, defining it according to a rhythm and a possible architecture of lines, bodies and spatial volumes that recall the monumentality and the cosmic rigor of the unique white Tagli presented by Fontana at that memorable edition of the Venice Biennale that year. The simultaneousness of his lines of research means that for Fontana there is also a certain differentiation of sensibility, materials and gesture. Thus when the first slashes appeared at the end of the 1950s, Fontana racked his brain to find a pictorial material that could accommodate the signs of his reinvigorated Spatialism and, at the same time, form new deep conceptions, holes, including sequins. He found his solution in thick oils (later on also using some acrylic colours), spread onto the surface heavily and in such large quantities that it almost became a plastic material on the canvas, ductile to work with, to mark with spatial graffiti and to puncture. With this material, Fontana rediscovered the realm of manual contact, the manipulating contact with which, already at the beginning of the Sixties, Fontana was creating canvases ploughed with graffiti-like marks of spatial forms and almost lacerating tears, penetrations that resulted in the modification and the modelling of the material. These were the years when Fontana returned to modelling terracotta in Albissola, working out new round and cosmic shapes found in the Nature, primordial material spheres, tactile and ploughed with circular slashes run through with a gravitational frenzy, lending them the existential weight of the dimensions of an unknown world. That spatial form was often the form scratched into oils, as in 62O77, where it subtly emerges from the profound darkness of the most absolute colour - black - and where the tear becomes a laceration; the material almost slips as it is pulled in and pushed out in its unstable malleability. Thus, at the same time as the philosophical state of the slashes, Fontana felt complete enough to make physical space. 'Space is no longer an abstraction but has become a dimension where man may even live, violating it with jets, Sputniks and spaceships. It is a human dimension capable of giving us a physiological anguish; a consternation of the soul, and I, in my most recent canvases am trying to express precisely this sensation.' A form of existential mysticism flowed through one part of Fontana, while another part was optimistically fascinated by these new worlds, by the possibilities offered by the new spatial science and by man's capacity to evolve in his creation of a new world. Thus, if on the one hand the oils assume the depth of the world consternated at the sight of an unknown infinity, on the other hand they are coloured in acid greens, luminous, carnal and sensual pinks, infinite whites and pure rips and clefts, or else they become the Byzantine and Baroque odes belonging to the Venetian series which formed such a perfect illustration of the artist's artistic geography. If the geography of the Venezie, with their exorbitant materials - the golds and silvers and the glassy allusive pieces redolent of the mosaics in San Marco - sing of a time belonging to art and of a place of feeling, the metals from the New York series vibrate with frenetic excitation, celebrating the civilisation of modern man, his architecture, the spaces, and his materials. Fontana was 'the man of the border,' as Laurence Alloway described him when he arrived in New York for the first time in the middle of September 1961. This journey would be unique for him, and fundamentally inspirational. He was in that city to exhibit the Venice series at the Martha Jackson Gallery , in an exhibition presented by the critic Michel Tapié. But the lagoon city was to be immediately supplanted by the vision of the New York skyscrapers, introduced to him by Philip Johnson, a special guide who was both an architect and a collector of his work. The huge steel and glass structures, the night time flow of lights along the immense roads, the new urban dimension seen through the eyes of a totally cyclopic European, fascinated him. 'It made a terrible impression,' he admitted, tracing a few drawings dedicated to the American city. Once back in Italy, the sensation continued to overwhelm Fontana, and so he decided to focus his works on capturing the concept, the idea of New York was so febrile. 'How can I paint this terrible New York? I asked myself. Then, all of a sudden I had an idea: I took the sheet of shining metal and I started working on it, turning it over vertically so as to give a sense of the skyscrapers, then puncturing it with a tool (...) no other material represents the sense of this metropolis all made from glass and crystal; of orgies of light and the gleam of metal.'[6] Thus the Metalli were born (cfr Copper 1962), luminous reflective sheets where the vertical lacerations, the tears in their architectural nature, pull the material towards the light creating shadows of emptiness, crests of battered brass, fringes of light. Some Metalli are torn with lacerations and almost convulsive marks while others exhibit the calm of an incised mark in the shape of an elongated spatial form, like an oval of serene space where the mark of the cut sinks like a portion of infinite darkness. In other places the mark is undulating, syncopated and almost closed within itself. Characterised by a new architectural potential, the Metalli take possession of the perspective and of the light, deforming every possible perception. These were the new characters in Fontana's adventure, which is ever more relevant to our eyes. [1] Interview with Lucio Fontana , in Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto, Laterza, Bari, 1969, p.169. [2] Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Skira, Milano, 2006, p. 64. [3] Piero Manzoni, Da Milano, "Il Pensiero Nazionale", 1 novembre 1959. [4] Fontana in interview with Grazia Livi, in Vanità, year VI,n13, Autumn 1962, pp. 53 seg. [5] For a more in depth discussion of the Venezia and New York series, see Lucio Fontana Venezia/New York, the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice between 4 June and 24 September 2006 and the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York from 10 October 2006 to 21 January 2007. [6] In Vanità, cit.pag.53.

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968)

Natura

细节

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968)
Natura
incised with the artist's initials 'L. F.' (on the side)
terracotta
7 3/8 x 7 3/8 x 7½in. (18.5 x 18.5 x 19cm.)
Executed in 1959-60

来源

Studio Marconi, Milan.
Private Collection, Japan.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

注意事项

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer's premium.

拍品专文

This work is registred in the Archivio Lucio Fontana, Milan, under no. 1737/96.

Lucio Fontana's Natura was created in 1959-60 and forms a part of one of the artist's most celebrated series of sculptures. In this group of works, Fontana explored with a new-found viscerality the contrast between the material and the spatial, between presence and void, and crucially did so through his idiosyncratic emphasis on gesture. In Natura, this gesture is clearly in evidence in the gash that the artist has worked in the deliberately rough terracotta surface of this asteroid-like entity. He has ploughed a furrow of space into the very fabric of his Natura, a wound exposing the nothingness within. Writing about some of the Natura that he created during this period, Fontana was unable to conceal his own enthusiasm for this new series: 'I am very pleased, I have managed to represent nothingness! This is the death of matter; pure life philosophy!' (Fontana, quoted in Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat., New York, 2006, p. 202). Perhaps some of this enthusiasm was due to the fact that Fontana, in creating works such as Natura, was returning to some of his sculptural roots.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War in particular, Fontana had often worked in terracotta, creating sculptures in which he explored the interpenetration of matter and space, laying the foundations for the movement which would later form around him: Spatial Art. Natura clearly shares those concerns, yet pushes them to a new level, not least through the introduction of the cosmic dimension invoked by the globe-like sculpture itself. He himself explained that he was, 'thinking of those worlds, of the moon with these... holes, this atrocious unnerving silence, and the astronauts in a new world. And, then, these... in the artists imagination... these immense things billions of years old - man arrives, in this deathly silence, in this anguish, and leaves a living sign of his presence... were these not the solid shapes that bore signs of wanting to make inert matter come alive?' (Fontana quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 2000, p. 194).