.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
'The man of today ... is too lost in a dimension that is immense for him, is too oppressed by the triumphs of science, is too dismayed by the inventions that follow one after the other, to recognise himself in figurative painting. What is wanted is an absolutely new language’
(L. Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London 2011, p. 260).
Elegantly sliced with two perfectly-placed slashes, Concetto spaziale, Attese has remained in the same collection since 1962, the time of its inception, when it was gifted to the present owner. A superb example of the Tagli or ‘slashes’ that Fontana began in the mid-1950s, it represents the artist’s revolutionary move away from the flat and illusory space of the canvas towards an art that was a synthesis of movement, time and space: an art that took account of new technology and scientific progress. Conceived in the late 1940s, Fontana’s Spatialist practice sought to harness new abstract concepts of energy and the infinite nature of space to produce an art that accurately reflected the Nuclear age. Following the idea that all matter is in a constant state of flux, the cutting gesture instigates a butterfly effect, transferring the spirit and energy of its own making from the body into and beyond the canvas plane to project endlessly into the infinity of space. It was only a few years earlier that the USSR had succeeded in sending Sputnik into a low orbit. Man had finally, albeit by proxy, touched the endlessness that is the cosmos, the space that surrounds our tiny globe. The space that is opened up in Concetto spaziale, Attese is a sliver of that same cosmos that was now so tantalisingly within mankind’s reach.
Inserting a third dimension into the two-dimensional plane, Fontana breaks away from the finite, impenetrable and resolutely flat character of the painting’s surface. The two pristine strikes across Concetto spaziale, Attese permit light, another form of moving energy, to not only bounce off the surface of the painting but, in theory, to pass through from our domain in front of the canvas or project from the abyss behind. Fontana has reduced the physical presence of the rectangular plane by painting it white, allowing the mystery of what lies behind the surgically precise slits to emerge with dramatic force. Although the force of taking a sharp blade to a painting was frequently interpreted as a violent and destructive act, Fontana defended his work as a creative exploration of intangible phenomena. His slashes were not an attack on art, or a vandalism desecrating the media of the now redundant past, but were instead the opening of a door into new realms of discovery for the art of the Space Age.
(L. Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London 2011, p. 260).
Elegantly sliced with two perfectly-placed slashes, Concetto spaziale, Attese has remained in the same collection since 1962, the time of its inception, when it was gifted to the present owner. A superb example of the Tagli or ‘slashes’ that Fontana began in the mid-1950s, it represents the artist’s revolutionary move away from the flat and illusory space of the canvas towards an art that was a synthesis of movement, time and space: an art that took account of new technology and scientific progress. Conceived in the late 1940s, Fontana’s Spatialist practice sought to harness new abstract concepts of energy and the infinite nature of space to produce an art that accurately reflected the Nuclear age. Following the idea that all matter is in a constant state of flux, the cutting gesture instigates a butterfly effect, transferring the spirit and energy of its own making from the body into and beyond the canvas plane to project endlessly into the infinity of space. It was only a few years earlier that the USSR had succeeded in sending Sputnik into a low orbit. Man had finally, albeit by proxy, touched the endlessness that is the cosmos, the space that surrounds our tiny globe. The space that is opened up in Concetto spaziale, Attese is a sliver of that same cosmos that was now so tantalisingly within mankind’s reach.
Inserting a third dimension into the two-dimensional plane, Fontana breaks away from the finite, impenetrable and resolutely flat character of the painting’s surface. The two pristine strikes across Concetto spaziale, Attese permit light, another form of moving energy, to not only bounce off the surface of the painting but, in theory, to pass through from our domain in front of the canvas or project from the abyss behind. Fontana has reduced the physical presence of the rectangular plane by painting it white, allowing the mystery of what lies behind the surgically precise slits to emerge with dramatic force. Although the force of taking a sharp blade to a painting was frequently interpreted as a violent and destructive act, Fontana defended his work as a creative exploration of intangible phenomena. His slashes were not an attack on art, or a vandalism desecrating the media of the now redundant past, but were instead the opening of a door into new realms of discovery for the art of the Space Age.