Concetto spaziale, Attesa

A single slash incises the spectacular red of Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attesa, 1966. The slim vertical line reveals an impenetrable black and an iconic declaration of intent. To achieve such fiery radiance, Fontana first painted the intense red which he then covered with a layer of fluorescence, achieving a new brighter red, an innovative technique at the time. The painting was held in the collection of an aristocrat, who along with his wife, was an important patron of post-war Italian artists. Born in Tuscany, he grew up in the villa where da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was painted and later studied history of art at university. His graduate thesis on the painter Beccafumi remains one of the most important texts on the Mannerist painter. Although a Renaissance art historian, he was drawn to the excitement and innovation of Post-war Italian artists scenes. He moved to Rome to marry his aristocratic wife and joined the energetic Roman cultural life of the time. He met many artists including Fontana and acquired this painting, which has been kept in the same collection for more than 50 years. Certainly, this radical imaginary is evoked in Concetto spaziale, Attesa: although cut directly into the canvas, Fontana’s marks were not destructive but rather creative, a simple gesture that invites the black infinity into the picture plane. In doing so, Fontana opened, both literally and figuratively, a new dimension of possibility to advance the course of art towards what he saw as ‘spatial’ era. ‘As a painter,’ he said, ‘while working on one of my perforated canvases, I do not want to make a painting: I want to open up space, create a new dimension for art, tie in with the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture’ (L. Fontana quoted in J. van der Marck & E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels 1974, p. 7).

Fontana’s fascination with technology’s potential made him heir to the Futurists, and the Space Age, especially, would serve as a fount of inspiration. Although Fontana’s Spatialist movement anticipated the earliest celestial explorations, his buchi (holes), or punctures created into the canvas, evoke constellations; they reach for what had previously been understood to be impossible. Fontana’s act of piercing quickly developed into something far more profound: with the tagli (cuts), he created a visual idiom that transcended the canvas to capture a sense of motion. Where the buchi had permitted only a glimpse of the dark territory beyond the canvas, the tagli part the curtain to reveal what Fontana described as ‘the fourth dimension’. ‘Infinity passes through them, light passes through them,’ he elaborated; ‘there is no need to paint’ (L. Fontana quoted in E. Crispolti, ‘Spatialism and Informel: The Fifties,’ in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 146). It is precisely this sense of overwhelming and incredible freedom that is expressed in works such as Concetto spaziale, Attesa. It is the presence of a new existence.