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Spatial awareness
Energy and space-both invisible entities that Fontana explored in his work.


By William Paton

LUCIO FONTANA WAS ALREADY A LONGESTABLISHED SCULPTOR by the outbreak of the Second World War. He had participated in exhibitions on an international level, creating works that were sometimes figurative, sometimes more abstracted, usually involving elements that seemed to test their own confines and boundaries, jutting into the space that held them and hinting at the developments yet to come.

However, his most famous, celebrated and recognised works all date from the Post- War period-these are the works that are driven by Spatialism, a concept that had only hatched during the 1940s while he was in Argentina. Executed in 1948, the year of his return from South America, Testa di medusa provides an intriguing link between some of the Art Deco-inspired works that had defined his earlier career and the exploration of space that was to become increasingly central to his oeuvre.

With its scintillating mosaic surface and the resolute three-dimensionality that is reinforced by the serpentine appendages to the medusa's head, this work occupies space and plays with light in a manner that anticipates the larger-scale projects that would come to be his greatest expressions of Spatialism. It was precisely now, having already conceived of an artistic movement that would embrace the advances in technology that heralded the age of rockets and televisions, that Fontana was beginning to conceive of working with space and movement as his media.

With this in mind, the Second Spatial Manifesto-signed in March of the same year that Testa di medusa was created- declared that 'with the resources of modern technology, we will make artificial forms wondrous rainbows luminous writings appear in the sky. We will transmit, on radio and on TV, artistic expressions of the new type' (quoted in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, Milan, 1998, p.118)

This futuristic vision of a new art truly came into being the following year, when Fontana began experimenting with holes, puncturing the picture surface initially in paper works, and then later experimenting with canvas too. These holes allowed Fontana to sculpt in pure space, to harness it within the pictorial plane, while also jolting his viewer into a new conception of the world.

By piercing the pictures, he not only highlights the obsolescence of traditional art, but also reveals an entire dimension of which we were formerly ignorant. Fontana first exhibited his Bucchi in 1952. Executed the following year, Concetto spaziale intriguingly recalls the Testa di medusa in the decorative appearance of the applied glass and in the constellation-like shape of the forms, which swirl like spiraling galaxies; at the same time, this work is an elegant and fully developed example of the new Spatialism.

The two areas of coloured glass resemble both tumbling figures- some hubristic Icarus, perhaps-and at the same time have a distinctly astronomical feel recalling the Milky Way and a counterpart galaxy, surrounded as they are by further arrangements of pin-pricks which themselves echo the stars in the firmament.

As the age of the rocket and of potential space travel approached, Fontana found himself increasingly fascinated with the Cosmos and featured it in various ways, directly or indirectly, in his works. Indeed, after man's first spacewalk during the next decade, he would dedicate an entire series of works to the exhilarating idea of man floating in Space, a concept that showed the world, governments and science making real what Fontana and his Spatialism had longed for.

Fontana was intrigued by space with both a big 'S' and a small one, and was increasingly fascinated by the act of creating it. His gestures came to play an increasingly important role in his Spatialism. The various movements that led to the creation of his works as he carved out space are in fact works in their own right, eternal and irrevocable acts. Once enacted, a movement can not be undone; while the world may crumble, Fontana's gesture will remain.

This is a means of capturing energy as well as space-both are invisible entities that Fontana sought to expose. They are the currency of an age of technology and science, replacing the religion that had occupied the artists of so many earlier eras. In his 1961 Concetto spaziale, a shimmering golden work that relates to the celebrated Venice paintings of the same year, the gestural nature of Fontana's creative process can be seen in the textured appearance of the surface, which he has smeared as well as punctured.

In another echo of the earlier works such as Testa di medusa, this work exudes a gilded baroque sense of luxury emphasised by the application of jewellike stones to a surface that also spills over with life and movement, much of it Fontana's own. An island-like oval adds to the sense of spatial definition, allowing the work to function in many different simultaneous ways, thematically recalling the islands of Venice in their lagoon or our planet hanging in the cosmos. The brutality of the holes themselves appears at odds with the picture's baroque quality, creating an intriguing tension.

It was perhaps in his Attese-his slash paintings-that Fontana found the simplest and most elegant incarnation of his Spatialism. Sometimes alone on a canvas, sometimes in a group, these slashes are the traces of an elegant, ballet-like gesture of creation and desecration. The canvas, for so long the traditional support of art and redundant representation, is torn open with a surgical precision, with a poetic sweep.

These cuts are calligraphic with their sublime grace. It was the slash, finally, that was to become Fontana's greatest trademark, his most eloquent encapsulation of Spatialism, and one that reappeared in several media. Metal and terracotta objects, installations in galleries and of course canvas all came to bear these Attese. In his 1963 painting Concetto spaziale, Attese, a sequence of tencuts runs along the length of the horizontal canvas.

The energy of the gesture is self-evident, as are the spaces that have been brought into existence by Fontana. It is apt considering the ballet-like, ritualistic movements with which the work must have come into existence, with the artist moving along and creating cut after cut, that this work comes to resemble a musical score-perhaps the impossible instructions for a hymn to the space that Fontana's work embraces.


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