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Lot Essay
Il Sole ("The Sun") is an extremely rare work that belongs to a striking experimental series of paintings which Fontana executed in 1959. These works are distinguished by their departure from the monochrome format that characterised his earlier Attese paintings.
The Attese ("Expectations") were so-named because when they were first exhibited by Fontana in 1958, they represented a dramatic departure from the buchi or holes which everyone had come to expect in his work. Using a single clean-cut slash to cut through the canvas and open its two-dimensional surface into a three dimensional world of infinite and seemingly dimensionless space, Fontana's cuts stand as the single most elegant gesture in the artist's oeuvre.
In ll Sole Fontana has incised five cuts of varying length into a stretched support of heavy-grained burlap that has been painted with three bands of yellow and gold. These bands have been painted over a fiery vermilion ground that adds an extra warmth and richness to these traditionally solar colours.
Using a landscape format that encourages an interpretation of the painting as a rendition of the sun's rays and of the radiant non-dimensional quality of light - a light too brilliant and intense to be seen by the naked human eye - the painting explores a spiritual understanding of the sun as a cosmic source of light, energy and matter. The intense invisible light of the sun can be seen to have been rendered by the central band of gold, and it is only this band of mystic colour that is intersected by the five cuts. Five cuts that like eclipses, suggest a mystic opening onto the infinite void of space. This ethereal quality is however grounded by the very material nature of the picture - by the heavy burlap that conveys a sense of matter impregnated with colour, with light and energy. In this way, ll Sole is a work that unifies a sense of the infinite with the material in the same way that the sun unifies light and matter.
The Attese ("Expectations") were so-named because when they were first exhibited by Fontana in 1958, they represented a dramatic departure from the buchi or holes which everyone had come to expect in his work. Using a single clean-cut slash to cut through the canvas and open its two-dimensional surface into a three dimensional world of infinite and seemingly dimensionless space, Fontana's cuts stand as the single most elegant gesture in the artist's oeuvre.
In ll Sole Fontana has incised five cuts of varying length into a stretched support of heavy-grained burlap that has been painted with three bands of yellow and gold. These bands have been painted over a fiery vermilion ground that adds an extra warmth and richness to these traditionally solar colours.
Using a landscape format that encourages an interpretation of the painting as a rendition of the sun's rays and of the radiant non-dimensional quality of light - a light too brilliant and intense to be seen by the naked human eye - the painting explores a spiritual understanding of the sun as a cosmic source of light, energy and matter. The intense invisible light of the sun can be seen to have been rendered by the central band of gold, and it is only this band of mystic colour that is intersected by the five cuts. Five cuts that like eclipses, suggest a mystic opening onto the infinite void of space. This ethereal quality is however grounded by the very material nature of the picture - by the heavy burlap that conveys a sense of matter impregnated with colour, with light and energy. In this way, ll Sole is a work that unifies a sense of the infinite with the material in the same way that the sun unifies light and matter.