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拍品专文
This work is registred in the Archivio Lucio Fontana, Milan, under no. 3798/1.
'My discovery was the hole and that's it. I am happy to go to my grave after such a discovery' (Fontana, quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London 2000, p. 12). Lucio Fontana regarded the hole as his great invention, but it is the cut, conceived ten years later in 1958, that became his most important trademark. At once iconic and iconoclastic, the cut was the poster for the Spatialism movement Fontana pioneered and one of the most emblematic contributions to the evolution of Post-War art. The artist's radical step of taking a knife to canvas forever altered its once hallowed surface-- the locus of almost half a millennium of aesthetic evolution. It also ushered in a new era of art that rejected allusion and illusion in favour of something more dynamic, objective, and literally present. Fontana called for the liberation of painting and sculpture from ossified convention; in an age dominated by science, he demanded that art explore concepts of space and time. Concetto spaziale, Attese is a perfect evocation of his objectives as its dramatic series of syncopated cuts both enshrine fleeting gestures and introduce actual space to the pictorial plane. This monochromatic painting cannot be confused with a picture, or with any kind of representation of anything other than itself. It declares only its own presence and physical material properties, while its apertures show space to be both abstract and real at the same time.
By pointing to the three-dimensional nature of the canvas, Fontana brings his earlier incarnation as a sculptor to the practice of painting, combining its different processes to forge a hybrid object that is no longer constrained by traditional classifications. Balletic flicks of the wrist have produced these elegant incisions and their careful pacing simultaneously evince a sense of spontaneity and control. For Fontana, the practice of creating his tagli (cuts) was deeply premeditated, the artist ruminating on his approach for hours, or even days. As he once explained, 'they think it's easy to make a cut or a hole, but it's not true. You have no idea how much stuff I throw away. The idea has to be realised with precision' (Lucio Fontana quoted in G. Ballo, Lucio Fontana, New York, 1971, p. 45). As chronicled in the famous series of staged photographs taken by Ugo Mulas in the artist's studio, Fontana would prepare himself, standing some distance from the easel until he could muster the appropriate physical and mental concentration. As he told Mulas at the time, 'I really have to be in the right mood to perform this task' (Lucio Fontana quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2000, p. 31). The cuts themselves were enacted in a sequence, first by saturating the canvas in white emulsion paint, allowing it to partially dry, and then by dragging a razor sharp blade swiftly down the canvas. The fabric support would then firm and dry out with time, the cut having been eased apart with the flat of the artist's hand. One of Fontana's close friends described this gesture as a 'caress', the artist tenderly working on the canvas and physically engaging it to gently open each furl. These openings created a conduit for light to pass through the painting's surface, but Fontana has deliberately sealed the back with black tape in order to emphasise the sense of Space and infinity lurking beyond the canvas. The void behind each cut of Concetto spaziale, Attese produces dark marks on the pristine white canvas, revealing two pairs of parallel lines offset on different angles. This formal structure elicits a sense of visual tension as the opposing forces of the slashes enliven the blank surface with a sense of kinetic energy.
Fontana shared his ambition to capture movement in his art with the pre-war Italian Futurists, who had proudly announced in their first manifesto: 'the gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It will be dynamic sensation itself' (U. Boccioni et al., 'Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto', 1910, reproduced in C. Harrison and P. Wood (ed.),Art in Theory 1900- 1990, Cambridge, 1993, p. 150). With the apparently simple gesture of striking through the canvas, Fontana remarkably achieved both. Concetto spaziale, Attese is as fresh as the day it was made. It is as if the artist has just attacked the canvas support with his blade. The vitality of his action emanates from its surface, thereby flattening time between the moment of the act and the present day. And it is that irrevocable gesture, that harnessing of the void, that is timeless. 'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal,' the First Manifesto of Spatialism declared, 'it doesn't matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal' (signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., 1998, pp. 117-18). It was, then, in the fabric of time and of space, rather than in the weave of his canvas, that Fontana was working. In the very space that he has opened up with his slashing gestures, he was crystallising his own act for eternity, regardless of the perishability of the canvas, or indeed of our world itself.
'My discovery was the hole and that's it. I am happy to go to my grave after such a discovery' (Fontana, quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London 2000, p. 12). Lucio Fontana regarded the hole as his great invention, but it is the cut, conceived ten years later in 1958, that became his most important trademark. At once iconic and iconoclastic, the cut was the poster for the Spatialism movement Fontana pioneered and one of the most emblematic contributions to the evolution of Post-War art. The artist's radical step of taking a knife to canvas forever altered its once hallowed surface-- the locus of almost half a millennium of aesthetic evolution. It also ushered in a new era of art that rejected allusion and illusion in favour of something more dynamic, objective, and literally present. Fontana called for the liberation of painting and sculpture from ossified convention; in an age dominated by science, he demanded that art explore concepts of space and time. Concetto spaziale, Attese is a perfect evocation of his objectives as its dramatic series of syncopated cuts both enshrine fleeting gestures and introduce actual space to the pictorial plane. This monochromatic painting cannot be confused with a picture, or with any kind of representation of anything other than itself. It declares only its own presence and physical material properties, while its apertures show space to be both abstract and real at the same time.
By pointing to the three-dimensional nature of the canvas, Fontana brings his earlier incarnation as a sculptor to the practice of painting, combining its different processes to forge a hybrid object that is no longer constrained by traditional classifications. Balletic flicks of the wrist have produced these elegant incisions and their careful pacing simultaneously evince a sense of spontaneity and control. For Fontana, the practice of creating his tagli (cuts) was deeply premeditated, the artist ruminating on his approach for hours, or even days. As he once explained, 'they think it's easy to make a cut or a hole, but it's not true. You have no idea how much stuff I throw away. The idea has to be realised with precision' (Lucio Fontana quoted in G. Ballo, Lucio Fontana, New York, 1971, p. 45). As chronicled in the famous series of staged photographs taken by Ugo Mulas in the artist's studio, Fontana would prepare himself, standing some distance from the easel until he could muster the appropriate physical and mental concentration. As he told Mulas at the time, 'I really have to be in the right mood to perform this task' (Lucio Fontana quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2000, p. 31). The cuts themselves were enacted in a sequence, first by saturating the canvas in white emulsion paint, allowing it to partially dry, and then by dragging a razor sharp blade swiftly down the canvas. The fabric support would then firm and dry out with time, the cut having been eased apart with the flat of the artist's hand. One of Fontana's close friends described this gesture as a 'caress', the artist tenderly working on the canvas and physically engaging it to gently open each furl. These openings created a conduit for light to pass through the painting's surface, but Fontana has deliberately sealed the back with black tape in order to emphasise the sense of Space and infinity lurking beyond the canvas. The void behind each cut of Concetto spaziale, Attese produces dark marks on the pristine white canvas, revealing two pairs of parallel lines offset on different angles. This formal structure elicits a sense of visual tension as the opposing forces of the slashes enliven the blank surface with a sense of kinetic energy.
Fontana shared his ambition to capture movement in his art with the pre-war Italian Futurists, who had proudly announced in their first manifesto: 'the gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It will be dynamic sensation itself' (U. Boccioni et al., 'Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto', 1910, reproduced in C. Harrison and P. Wood (ed.),Art in Theory 1900- 1990, Cambridge, 1993, p. 150). With the apparently simple gesture of striking through the canvas, Fontana remarkably achieved both. Concetto spaziale, Attese is as fresh as the day it was made. It is as if the artist has just attacked the canvas support with his blade. The vitality of his action emanates from its surface, thereby flattening time between the moment of the act and the present day. And it is that irrevocable gesture, that harnessing of the void, that is timeless. 'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal,' the First Manifesto of Spatialism declared, 'it doesn't matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal' (signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., 1998, pp. 117-18). It was, then, in the fabric of time and of space, rather than in the weave of his canvas, that Fontana was working. In the very space that he has opened up with his slashing gestures, he was crystallising his own act for eternity, regardless of the perishability of the canvas, or indeed of our world itself.