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Lot Essay
"My discovery was the hole and that's it. I am happy to go to my grave after such a discovery" (Fontana, quoted in S. Whitford, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., 2001, p. 12).
Although Lucio Fontana regarded the hole as his great invention, it was the cut, conceived ten years later, that became his emblem. The artist's radical step of taking a knife to the canvas forever altered its once hallowed surface-- the locus of almost half a millennium of aesthetic evolution. His was simultaneously an iconoclastic act against painting and an innovative breakthrough into the medium.
Spearheading the Spatialist movement, Fontana called for the liberation of painting and sculpture from ossified convention; in an era dominated by science, he demanded that art explore concepts of space and time. Like portals to another dimension, his slashes dawn on an infinite realm akin to the unchartered territories of the cosmos. Concetto spaziale, Attese is a perfect evocation of Fontana's objectives with its microcosm of slashes echoing the vastness of the universe. Balletic flicks of the wrist produce its elegant incisions although the violence inherent in the repeated cuts of a Stanley knife is barely camouflaged. The artist literally opens the canvas to new possibilities and interpretations. Pointing to the three-dimensional nature of the canvas, Fontana brings his earlier incarnation as a sculptor to the practice of painting, combining its different processes to forge a hybrid object that is no longer constrained by traditional classifications.
Meanwhile, like exquisitely refined wounds bleeding into a crimson background, Concetto spaziale, Attese embodies both the death and the resurrection of the canvas. Fontana's desecration of the canvas is particularly subversive considering his roots in Italy, the land of the Renaissance. Indeed, his vocabulary of slashes is not without its pedigreed history-- the greatest works of Renaissance and Baroque art enter his oeuvre. Particularly resonant is the lance wound of Christ, memorialized in paintings of the crucifixion, the pietá and the resurrection; contemplating Concetto spaziale, Attese in the context of Michelangelo's Pietà, one is awakened to the deep origins of his cuts. Even the verticality and frontality of his slashes suggest the form of a figure on the cross, while the pain evoked in the wounding of the canvas invokes Christ's suffering. Indeed, the motif of the crucifixion is entirely apt for Fontana's staging of death and rebirth in the medium of painting.
Although Lucio Fontana regarded the hole as his great invention, it was the cut, conceived ten years later, that became his emblem. The artist's radical step of taking a knife to the canvas forever altered its once hallowed surface-- the locus of almost half a millennium of aesthetic evolution. His was simultaneously an iconoclastic act against painting and an innovative breakthrough into the medium.
Spearheading the Spatialist movement, Fontana called for the liberation of painting and sculpture from ossified convention; in an era dominated by science, he demanded that art explore concepts of space and time. Like portals to another dimension, his slashes dawn on an infinite realm akin to the unchartered territories of the cosmos. Concetto spaziale, Attese is a perfect evocation of Fontana's objectives with its microcosm of slashes echoing the vastness of the universe. Balletic flicks of the wrist produce its elegant incisions although the violence inherent in the repeated cuts of a Stanley knife is barely camouflaged. The artist literally opens the canvas to new possibilities and interpretations. Pointing to the three-dimensional nature of the canvas, Fontana brings his earlier incarnation as a sculptor to the practice of painting, combining its different processes to forge a hybrid object that is no longer constrained by traditional classifications.
Meanwhile, like exquisitely refined wounds bleeding into a crimson background, Concetto spaziale, Attese embodies both the death and the resurrection of the canvas. Fontana's desecration of the canvas is particularly subversive considering his roots in Italy, the land of the Renaissance. Indeed, his vocabulary of slashes is not without its pedigreed history-- the greatest works of Renaissance and Baroque art enter his oeuvre. Particularly resonant is the lance wound of Christ, memorialized in paintings of the crucifixion, the pietá and the resurrection; contemplating Concetto spaziale, Attese in the context of Michelangelo's Pietà, one is awakened to the deep origins of his cuts. Even the verticality and frontality of his slashes suggest the form of a figure on the cross, while the pain evoked in the wounding of the canvas invokes Christ's suffering. Indeed, the motif of the crucifixion is entirely apt for Fontana's staging of death and rebirth in the medium of painting.