拍品專文
With its two slashes thrust into relief by their contrast with the pristine white canvas surrounding them, Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale, Attese draws the viewer's attention to the verticality that lies at the heart of the composition. These parallel slits in the picture surface create a sense almost of a column rising through the support. They serve both as individual incisions and also as the sides of what appears to be a bar dominating the centre of the picture. The symmetry and sheer sense of balance that Fontana has employed lend the work a vivid dynamism.
That upward sense of motion, of verticality, chimes with Fontana's ideas of Spatial Art, which had become all the more pertinent by the time he created Concetto spaziale, Attese in 1968, when Man had not only reached Space but had even stepped out of his spacecraft and into the void. These stark, dark cuts convey a sense of the power of life, recalling Barnett Newman's paintings, in which the verticality of man is evoked through his 'zips'. At the same time, against this dazzlingly white backdrop, they convey a sense of amazement and awe that recalls Fontana's own statement from the 1960s. He declared that, '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' (Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 260).
With his cuts, Fontana was seeking to capture just such an language, in which he captured both the sense of breakthrough, as the tether that linked man to the Earth was ruptured, and also the tenacious grasp upon life embodied by the human race, a factor that was itself thrown into a new disorientating light by the increasing awareness of the scale of the universe surrounding our planet brought about by our new contact with the infinite vastness of the cosmos. 'Man goes to these worlds and finds them empty,' Fontana said only two years before he created Concetto spaziale, Attese. 'Huge, uninhabited chunks of minerals. We arrive and understand this anguish... there are people who recognise that the hole, in the sense of the void, nothing, made by subtraction from the canvas, can say a great deal' (Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 256).
That upward sense of motion, of verticality, chimes with Fontana's ideas of Spatial Art, which had become all the more pertinent by the time he created Concetto spaziale, Attese in 1968, when Man had not only reached Space but had even stepped out of his spacecraft and into the void. These stark, dark cuts convey a sense of the power of life, recalling Barnett Newman's paintings, in which the verticality of man is evoked through his 'zips'. At the same time, against this dazzlingly white backdrop, they convey a sense of amazement and awe that recalls Fontana's own statement from the 1960s. He declared that, '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' (Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 260).
With his cuts, Fontana was seeking to capture just such an language, in which he captured both the sense of breakthrough, as the tether that linked man to the Earth was ruptured, and also the tenacious grasp upon life embodied by the human race, a factor that was itself thrown into a new disorientating light by the increasing awareness of the scale of the universe surrounding our planet brought about by our new contact with the infinite vastness of the cosmos. 'Man goes to these worlds and finds them empty,' Fontana said only two years before he created Concetto spaziale, Attese. 'Huge, uninhabited chunks of minerals. We arrive and understand this anguish... there are people who recognise that the hole, in the sense of the void, nothing, made by subtraction from the canvas, can say a great deal' (Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 256).