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Lot Essay
A vivid meditation on space, surface and spirit, Concetto spaziale (1960) is a striking red example of Lucio Fontana’s Olii or ‘Oils’. With this series of paintings—begun in 1960 and culminating with his celebrated Fine di Dio cycle of 1963—Fontana incorporated the textural qualities of oil paint into the slashed and punctured ‘Spatialist’ canvases he had developed over the past decade. The present work’s gleaming red surface is pierced by four vertical lines of tagli (‘slashes’) and buchi (‘holes’). They are surrounded by a circle scored into the pigment, creating the impression of a cratered planet hanging in space. The ovoid form recalls Fontana’s Nature sculptures of 1959-1960, whose spheres burst open like gaping seedpods. For Fontana, these piercings and openings represented a new beginning for mankind in the ‘Spatial’ era, bringing together destruction, creation, death and rebirth.
In 1946, Fontana and a group of avant-garde artists in his native Argentina had published the Manifesto Blanco. They declared that art had exhausted the confines of the earth, suggesting that ‘painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist’. Instead, they called for a new mode of image-making ‘based on the unity of time and space’ (L. Fontana et al., Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). As humankind took its first steps into the cosmos, Fontana sought an art commensurate with the explorations of contemporary science. Abandoning traditional notions of painting and sculpture, he pledged his allegiance to ‘Spatialism’. By perforating the surface of the canvas—initially through his series of buchi, before the tagli took hold in 1958—he broke through to a fourth dimension, and gave form to the invisible forces that underpin all matter. Red, immortalised in his landmark 1967 installation Spatial Environment in Red Light, would become one of his most iconic hues, blazing with cosmic power.
With their stark, stigmata-like wounds and often vivid colour-schemes, the Olii represent a viscerally material branch of Fontana’s Spatialism, echoing his early training as a sculptor. Their surfaces, he explained, traced a journey from exploration to transcendence, and from flesh to spirit. ‘The fine outline [drawn into the oily surface] ... is the itinerary of man in space, his surprise and fear of getting lost; the cut, lastly, is a sudden scream of pain, the final release of deep anguish that in the end becomes unbearable’ (L. Fontana quoted in G. Livi, ‘Incontro con Lucio Fontana’, Vanità, Vol. VI, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 53). This image of mystical climax is central to the Olii. Fontana conceived of these works as anticipating both the joy of man’s liberation into space and the primal scream—the ‘final release of deep anguish’—that would accompany his transformation. For Fontana, works such as the present envisioned both a pictorial and a spiritual evolution: in the space-age of the future, man would leave his body behind to become pure soul.
In 1946, Fontana and a group of avant-garde artists in his native Argentina had published the Manifesto Blanco. They declared that art had exhausted the confines of the earth, suggesting that ‘painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist’. Instead, they called for a new mode of image-making ‘based on the unity of time and space’ (L. Fontana et al., Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). As humankind took its first steps into the cosmos, Fontana sought an art commensurate with the explorations of contemporary science. Abandoning traditional notions of painting and sculpture, he pledged his allegiance to ‘Spatialism’. By perforating the surface of the canvas—initially through his series of buchi, before the tagli took hold in 1958—he broke through to a fourth dimension, and gave form to the invisible forces that underpin all matter. Red, immortalised in his landmark 1967 installation Spatial Environment in Red Light, would become one of his most iconic hues, blazing with cosmic power.
With their stark, stigmata-like wounds and often vivid colour-schemes, the Olii represent a viscerally material branch of Fontana’s Spatialism, echoing his early training as a sculptor. Their surfaces, he explained, traced a journey from exploration to transcendence, and from flesh to spirit. ‘The fine outline [drawn into the oily surface] ... is the itinerary of man in space, his surprise and fear of getting lost; the cut, lastly, is a sudden scream of pain, the final release of deep anguish that in the end becomes unbearable’ (L. Fontana quoted in G. Livi, ‘Incontro con Lucio Fontana’, Vanità, Vol. VI, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 53). This image of mystical climax is central to the Olii. Fontana conceived of these works as anticipating both the joy of man’s liberation into space and the primal scream—the ‘final release of deep anguish’—that would accompany his transformation. For Fontana, works such as the present envisioned both a pictorial and a spiritual evolution: in the space-age of the future, man would leave his body behind to become pure soul.