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Lot Essay
Rare for its combination of ten incisions upon a deep blue backdrop, Concetto spaziale, Attese is an exceptional example of Lucio Fontana’s Tagli (‘Cuts’). This iconic cycle of works, which occupied the artist for the best part of a decade, stands among the most important achievements of the post-war Italian avant-garde. Revealing the uncharted territory behind the canvas, the Tagli marked the culmination of Fontana’s ‘Spatialist’ theories, offering elegant responses to humankind’s exploration of the cosmos. Executed in 1964, at the height of the artist’s powers, the present work’s rhythmic slashes are scored with near-calligraphic precision. Darkness lingers beyond, offset by a luminous, celestial ground. The reverse of the canvas, which the artist habitually inscribed with diary-like notations, reads ‘Domani è festa’ (‘Tomorrow is a holiday’). Alive with joyful optimism and anticipation, it is a thrilling instance of Fontana’s vision for art at the pinnacle of the Space Age.
The son of a sculptor, Fontana was born in Argentina in 1899. During his school days in Italy he was deeply inspired by the rhetoric of Futurism, and later spent time in Paris where he encountered the work of Constantin Brâncuși, Joan Miró and others. In 1940, having initially followed his father into the world of sculpture, Fontana founded the alternative art school Escuela libre de artes plásticas Altamira in Buenos Aires. It was there that he and a group of students formulated the Manifesto blanco (‘White Manifesto’) in 1946: a seminal document that called for a new ‘four-dimensional’ art form to replace the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. After his return to Milan the following year, Fontana expanded upon these ideas in his first and second Manifesto spaziale (‘Spatialist Manifesto’), expressing a desire to ‘liberate art from matter’ and to foster new collaborations between science and art. In this vein he read widely, absorbing in particular the work of Albert Einstein, and his theory that time and space existed on a single continuum.
The Tagli, begun in 1958, owed much to Fontana’s earlier series of Buchi (‘Holes’), which stood among the earliest major manifestations of Spatialism. These works were the first to pierce the canvas, using pointed tools to create holes in its surface. Fontana coined the term Concetto spaziale (‘Spatial Concept’) to describe these new creations: their surfaces were no longer windows onto the world, but rather portals to the unexplored terrains behind and beyond the picture plane. Art, according to this proposition, was no longer a static earthbound object but a zone of conceptual possibility. It was with the Tagli, however, that these ideas truly took flight. The sweeping arc of Fontana’s knife gave form to the notion of separating art and matter: the act of art-making resided not in the finished object but in the gesture itself, which lingered after the fact like the tail of a comet or the trajectory of a rocket. The canvas, as such, became a repository for time, movement and energy. The cuts not only allowed the viewer to glimpse the void: they recorded the experience of crossing into the beyond, and free-falling into the abyss.
By the time of the present work, the discoveries of the Space Age had reached new heights, fuelled in part by Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering orbit of the Earth in 1961. Fontana, too, had shot to international stardom, making his solo debut in New York as well as completing his landmark cycle La Fine di Dio (‘The End of God’). Two years later, in 1966, his room of white Tagli would win the prestigious International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. His work chimed with many of the artistic currents of his time: from the self-referential purity of Minimalism to the spiritual aspirations of Abstract Expressionism. His embrace of monochromy, in particular, shared much in common with the work of artists such as Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni and Yayoi Kusama, who sought a new ‘ground zero’ for art in the aftermath of the Second World War. The present work’s blue surface evokes the dazzling ‘IKB’ monochromes of his friend Yves Klein, themselves inspired by the celestial frescoes of Giotto and fuelled by a similar desire to conjure the experience of infinity.
The process of making the Tagli was one of almost meditative simplicity and rigour. After painting the canvas in multiple layers of thin paint—an approach that ensured a totally even surface—Fontana would stand in silence, knife in hand, quietly watching for the perfect moment to strike. The expression Attesa or Attese, appended to many of his titles, translates as ‘waiting’ or ‘expectation’. According to Pia Gottschaller, however, the word also captured ‘the artist’s optimistic belief in the potential of humankind. For him it implied an existential sense of possibility and expectation in the present moment: the moment as an ontological opening into the spaciousness of Being’ (P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 60). By inscribing notes on the reverse of his work, moreover—often documenting minor details of his day-to-day existence—Fontana linked this sense of metaphysical anticipation to the routine passage of human time. In the present work, the notion of awaiting ‘tomorrow’ seems particularly poignant: as the Earth rotates on its axis, humanity edges ever-closer to new frontiers, delving deeper into the mysteries of the universe.
The son of a sculptor, Fontana was born in Argentina in 1899. During his school days in Italy he was deeply inspired by the rhetoric of Futurism, and later spent time in Paris where he encountered the work of Constantin Brâncuși, Joan Miró and others. In 1940, having initially followed his father into the world of sculpture, Fontana founded the alternative art school Escuela libre de artes plásticas Altamira in Buenos Aires. It was there that he and a group of students formulated the Manifesto blanco (‘White Manifesto’) in 1946: a seminal document that called for a new ‘four-dimensional’ art form to replace the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. After his return to Milan the following year, Fontana expanded upon these ideas in his first and second Manifesto spaziale (‘Spatialist Manifesto’), expressing a desire to ‘liberate art from matter’ and to foster new collaborations between science and art. In this vein he read widely, absorbing in particular the work of Albert Einstein, and his theory that time and space existed on a single continuum.
The Tagli, begun in 1958, owed much to Fontana’s earlier series of Buchi (‘Holes’), which stood among the earliest major manifestations of Spatialism. These works were the first to pierce the canvas, using pointed tools to create holes in its surface. Fontana coined the term Concetto spaziale (‘Spatial Concept’) to describe these new creations: their surfaces were no longer windows onto the world, but rather portals to the unexplored terrains behind and beyond the picture plane. Art, according to this proposition, was no longer a static earthbound object but a zone of conceptual possibility. It was with the Tagli, however, that these ideas truly took flight. The sweeping arc of Fontana’s knife gave form to the notion of separating art and matter: the act of art-making resided not in the finished object but in the gesture itself, which lingered after the fact like the tail of a comet or the trajectory of a rocket. The canvas, as such, became a repository for time, movement and energy. The cuts not only allowed the viewer to glimpse the void: they recorded the experience of crossing into the beyond, and free-falling into the abyss.
By the time of the present work, the discoveries of the Space Age had reached new heights, fuelled in part by Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering orbit of the Earth in 1961. Fontana, too, had shot to international stardom, making his solo debut in New York as well as completing his landmark cycle La Fine di Dio (‘The End of God’). Two years later, in 1966, his room of white Tagli would win the prestigious International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. His work chimed with many of the artistic currents of his time: from the self-referential purity of Minimalism to the spiritual aspirations of Abstract Expressionism. His embrace of monochromy, in particular, shared much in common with the work of artists such as Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni and Yayoi Kusama, who sought a new ‘ground zero’ for art in the aftermath of the Second World War. The present work’s blue surface evokes the dazzling ‘IKB’ monochromes of his friend Yves Klein, themselves inspired by the celestial frescoes of Giotto and fuelled by a similar desire to conjure the experience of infinity.
The process of making the Tagli was one of almost meditative simplicity and rigour. After painting the canvas in multiple layers of thin paint—an approach that ensured a totally even surface—Fontana would stand in silence, knife in hand, quietly watching for the perfect moment to strike. The expression Attesa or Attese, appended to many of his titles, translates as ‘waiting’ or ‘expectation’. According to Pia Gottschaller, however, the word also captured ‘the artist’s optimistic belief in the potential of humankind. For him it implied an existential sense of possibility and expectation in the present moment: the moment as an ontological opening into the spaciousness of Being’ (P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 60). By inscribing notes on the reverse of his work, moreover—often documenting minor details of his day-to-day existence—Fontana linked this sense of metaphysical anticipation to the routine passage of human time. In the present work, the notion of awaiting ‘tomorrow’ seems particularly poignant: as the Earth rotates on its axis, humanity edges ever-closer to new frontiers, delving deeper into the mysteries of the universe.