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拍品專文
Concetto Spaziale stands as one of the last olii ever created by Lucio Fontana. Executed in 1968, the pristine white surface culminating in a jaggedly encrusted buco or ‘hole’ perfectly encapsulates the Spatialist concept which defined not only Fontana’s practice but his legacy in Post-War art. The olii explored both the plastic and textural possibilities of his Spatialist art through a combination of the fluid materiality of the medium of paint and the hole. Rendered in thick, white oil paint, Fontana makes direct contact with the sumptuous atramentous surface of the canvas, disrupting its pristine materiality with one ultimate hole that opens the work’s surface to the void. The orifice that penetrates the canvas is alive with the air and light that passes through it, yet it is equally suspended in time, infinitely re-enacting the moment of its creation. In this articulation of the surface, Fontana imbues his Concetto spaziale with a sense of the sculptural, increasing its autonomous objecthood and emphasising the leap into the third dimension that is made with the gestural buco in the centre. Here, through the simple fundamentals and elemental language of his ‘Spatialist’ art, Fontana has created an holistic work that truly expresses the aim first made in his 3rd Manifesto of Spatialism that asserted: ‘the spatialist artist no longer imposes a figurative theme on his art... but allows that theme to be formed in the mind of the viewer’. (L. Fontana, ‘3rd Manifesto of Spatialism,’ in P. Néel and W. Schmied (eds.), Lucio Fontana Reaching Out into Space, 1985).
Revelling in the tactile and sculptural experience that went into creating this work, Fontana’s engagement with his material creates an abundantly gestural and dynamic surface; surrounding the whole composition is a freely gestured circle, scored into the paint by a hard-edged instrument. The resulting pattern recalls cosmic constellations, the ripened flesh of fruit and even the carnal imprint of female sexuality. Defined by the materiality of the thick, often acrylic-based paints, the surface visually records the artist’s impassioned movements, his brushstrokes immortalised in the quick-drying surface. Of all the picture-formats that Fontana ever created, it was in the olii that he most boldly intermingled the sense of space with material. Indeed the work’s enigmatic perimeter line is typical of Fontana’s oil paintings of this period and were later described by him as ‘the path of man in space, his dismay and horror of going astray’ (L. Fontana quoted in B. Hess, Lucio Fontana, 1899-1968: A New Fact In Sculpture, Cologne 2006, p. 68). In Fontana’s cosmology the sensation provoked by his punctures is a multifaceted proposition. Representing not only the infinite third-dimension, and the frontiers of creativity, they also echo the pleasure of man’s liberation in space and the unknown possibilities that accompanied this transition. In this way, Concetto spaziale becomes an image of physical transformation, transcendence, and change. It not only opens up the picture plane to allow energy and light to pass through the canvas into the cosmos beyond, but also stands as a fervent existential response to man’s newfound ability to enter this space himself. In this way, Concetto spaziale perfectly encapsulates the declaration of the Second Spatial Manifesto that: ‘The work of art is destroyed by time. ‘When, in the final blaze of the universe, time and space no longer exist, there will be no memory of the monuments erected by man, although not a single hair on his head will have been lost. But we do not intend to abolish the art of the past or to stop life: we want painting to escape from its frame and sculpture from its bell-jar. An expression of aerial art of a minute is as if it lasts a thousand years, an eternity’ (L. Fontana, ‘The Second Spatial Manifesto’, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Milan, 1998, p. 118).
Revelling in the tactile and sculptural experience that went into creating this work, Fontana’s engagement with his material creates an abundantly gestural and dynamic surface; surrounding the whole composition is a freely gestured circle, scored into the paint by a hard-edged instrument. The resulting pattern recalls cosmic constellations, the ripened flesh of fruit and even the carnal imprint of female sexuality. Defined by the materiality of the thick, often acrylic-based paints, the surface visually records the artist’s impassioned movements, his brushstrokes immortalised in the quick-drying surface. Of all the picture-formats that Fontana ever created, it was in the olii that he most boldly intermingled the sense of space with material. Indeed the work’s enigmatic perimeter line is typical of Fontana’s oil paintings of this period and were later described by him as ‘the path of man in space, his dismay and horror of going astray’ (L. Fontana quoted in B. Hess, Lucio Fontana, 1899-1968: A New Fact In Sculpture, Cologne 2006, p. 68). In Fontana’s cosmology the sensation provoked by his punctures is a multifaceted proposition. Representing not only the infinite third-dimension, and the frontiers of creativity, they also echo the pleasure of man’s liberation in space and the unknown possibilities that accompanied this transition. In this way, Concetto spaziale becomes an image of physical transformation, transcendence, and change. It not only opens up the picture plane to allow energy and light to pass through the canvas into the cosmos beyond, but also stands as a fervent existential response to man’s newfound ability to enter this space himself. In this way, Concetto spaziale perfectly encapsulates the declaration of the Second Spatial Manifesto that: ‘The work of art is destroyed by time. ‘When, in the final blaze of the universe, time and space no longer exist, there will be no memory of the monuments erected by man, although not a single hair on his head will have been lost. But we do not intend to abolish the art of the past or to stop life: we want painting to escape from its frame and sculpture from its bell-jar. An expression of aerial art of a minute is as if it lasts a thousand years, an eternity’ (L. Fontana, ‘The Second Spatial Manifesto’, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Milan, 1998, p. 118).