Concetto spaziale, Attese

With five tapered slashes dancing across its dazzling scarlet surface, Concetto spaziale, Attese is a concise and hypnotic example of Lucio Fontana’s celebrated tagli (‘cuts’). Fanning outwards from the central vertical incision, the cuts bend and warp as if receding into the distance, creating a dramatic sense of perspective. This arrangement—rare within Fontana’s oeuvre—powerfully underscores the spatial theatre of his art. Executed in 1961, the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space, the work takes its place within a practice that sought to match the scientific advancements of its time. By opening up the uncharted space beyond the canvas, Fontana liberated it from the burden of representation, reconceiving the picture plane as a ‘spatial concept’ (concetto spaziale). In the present work, the artist eloquently dramatises this paradigm shift. Where space was once conjured through perspectival illusion—as evoked here—it was now part and parcel of the artwork itself. The dark void beyond the canvas was at last made visible, in all its wondrous and terrifying infinity.

In 1946, as the world recovered from the traumas of global conflict, Fontana and a group of avant-garde artists in his native Argentina published the Manifesto Blanco. It declared that art had exhausted the confines of the earth, suggesting that ‘painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist’. Instead, it called for a new mode of image-making ‘based on the unity of time and space’ (L. Fontana et al, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). As humankind took its first steps into the cosmos, Fontana believed that art should seek to match the discoveries of contemporary scientific enquiry. Abandoning traditional notions of painting and sculpture, and pledging his allegiance to ‘Spatialism’, he seized space, time and energy as his new muses. By perforating the surface of the canvas—initially through his series of buchi (‘holes’), before the tagli took hold in 1958—he succeeded in giving form to the invisible forces that underpin all matter. Red, immortalised in his landmark 1967 installation Spatial Environment in Red Light, became one of his most iconic hues, blazing with incendiary power.

In the present work, Fontana offers a succinct vision of his break with the past. Science had suggested that space and time were non-linear entities; art, Fontana believed, must adapt accordingly. Since the Renaissance, notions of linear perspective had dictated that three-dimensional space could be rendered convincingly upon a two-dimensional plane. By invoking this principle through his receding articulation of cuts, Fontana ultimately highlights its redundancy. His ‘spatial concepts’ were, he explained, ‘beyond perspective’: ‘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’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, ‘Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties’, in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 146). It was no longer necessary to represent space upon the surface of the canvas; rather, the canvas asserted itself as a spatial entity, light and shadow funnelling through its incisions. A fourth dimension for art had finally come into play.

1961 was also the year that Fontana visited New York for the first time. While his work was already deeply influential in Europe, his concetti spaziali would ultimately come to resonate with the burgeoning strains of Minimalism that were beginning to take hold across the Atlantic. Fontana’s notion of the artwork as a self-defining entity would find much in common with the work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt and others, all of whom sought to rid their creations of representational interference. At the same time, however, the tagli were underscored by a sense of spiritual aspiration, often inciting comparison with Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’. The word attese, which Fontana frequently appended to his titles, translates as ‘waiting’ or ‘expectation’, reflecting the artist’s belief in the transcendental promise of his cuts. ‘They are the mystery of the Unknown in art,’ he explained; ‘they are the Expectation of something that must follow’ (L. Fontana, quoted in Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2006, p. 47). In the present work, five dark portals beckon the viewer into undiscovered territory, inviting us to contemplate a space beyond the limits of our imagination.