Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita

“Fontana spiritualizes his art not by dematerialization, but—on the contrary—by an almost magical intensification of materiality.” -Lóránd Hegyi
Opulent and spectacular, Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita is the splendid culmination of Lucio Fontana’s decades-long quest to discover a boldly innovative expression of spatiality which redirected the trajectory of contemporary art. A defining masterpiece from the Italian artist’s much-celebrated Venezie cycle of twenty-two large-scale works made in homage to Venice, the work’s dazzlingly reflective surface encloses a thrilling display of light across and through space, the artist’s famed Buchi and Pietre integrating the realm of the viewer into a bold reassessment of contemporary art. Openly ambiguous and fascinatingly complex, the work is a glorious celebration of light and space, satirizing the Venetian Baroque artistic tradition whilst simultaneously celebrating its magical and romantic effects.
Made between the spring and summer of 1961 for the exhibition Arte e Contemplazione at Palazzo Grassi, Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita is almost unique in Fontana’s oeuvre for its titular spatial evocation of a real place and time—Saint Mark’s Square in Venice at night—and is the sole work from the Venezie series to be dedicated to his wife, Teresita. This unique episode in Fontana’s career, where he used objective elements and shapes as signifiers for a deeply personal meaning alluding to his own memory as well as to broader culture, sees the harmonic unity between the two disparate strands of his practice to date—his spatial abstractions and his experiments with materiality. Steeped in art history and in dialogue with his contemporaries, Fontana with his Venezie cycle prophetically anticipates the future course of art. Viewing the cycle first exhibited at Palazzo Grassi, the acclaimed art critic and philosopher Gillo Dorfles proclaimed how, “with almost simple means and a courageous imagination, Fontana has been able to create, once again, a new and unprecedented art genre” (G. Dorfles, quoted in P. Campiglio, “I only Believe in Art,” in Lucio Fontana: Venice / New York, exh., cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006, p. 204).
Fontana lavishes Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita with a luscious decorative program, embedding his colorful Pietre (Stones) into his thick layers of sumptuous black paint to create a decadently Baroque composition radiating luminance. Fontana ruptures the spatial integrity of his canvas with his Buchi (Holes) which follow the perimeter of the work in three concentric rectangular sweeps, whose architectural construction faintly articulates Saint Mark’s iconic pavement and colonnade. Fontana achieves his Buchi by piercing his canvas from the reverse after allowing the paint to partially dry, irreparably perforating the canvas while pushing the layers of linen and paint outwards, presenting the raw physicality of his materials toward the viewer. Emphasizing the importance of this achievement, the art historian Lóránd Hegyi writes, “Fontana spiritualizes his art not by dematerialization, but—on the contrary—by an almost magical intensification of materiality” (quoted in P. Gottschaller, “Looking through the Glass, and What Fontana Found There,” in Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold, ed. I. Candela, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2019, p. 67). With this program, Fontana evokes the glamor of Saint Mark’s Square, the epicenter of the Venetian lagoon and foundation of the city’s identity.
Fontana liberally plied buttery swathes of dense, black paint across Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita, building a forceful field of thick impastos out of his synthetic paint thinned with stereatic acrylic resin. Following from his Olii (Oils) series using oil paint, Fontana discovered a new alkyd-based medium which allowed him to apply unprecedented amounts of pigment onto his canvas, establishing a rich, gleaming texture and affecting a marvelous plasticity onto the tableau which he meticulously worked with palette knifes and his own fingers, relying on his training as a sculptor of stone and clay to mold the surface into his desired fluid form exuding sensuality. Rejoicing in his new painting medium, Fontana wrote that he painted his Venezie cycle “not in oil, that is, but with a new plastic material” (L. Fontana, quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 104). One of Fontana’s most painterly works, here the artist is giving homage to the Venetian tradition, whose early adaptation of the oil-based medium altered the course of art history.
The Buchi rhythmically executed across the composition are a crucially important original element central to Fontana’s revolutionary concept of Spazialismo—a novel visual poetic which sought to overcome what the artist saw as the stagnation of artistic progress after the exhaustion of gestural abstraction and Art Informel. These holes rupturing the picture plane are Fontana’s original gesture, foundational to his artistic enterprise and emblematic of the artist’s Concetto spaziale, expanding conceptual space past and beyond the field of the tableau, “punched through with a prolonged gesture as if turning a knife in a wound,” as art historian Luca Massimo Barbero describes (L. M. Barbero, “Lucio Fontana: Venice / New York,” in Lucio Fontana: Venice / New York, exh., cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006, p. 24). Recounting the discovery of his Buchi, Fontana noted the crisis art faced in the age of rapid technological innovation, which led to the realization that “what we need is an absolutely new language, a ‘Gesture’ purified of all ties with the past, which gives expression to this state of despair, of existential anguish” (quoted in op. cit., p. 23). Fontana observed with his Buchi that “the discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: Thus I pierce this canvas, which is the basis of all the arts and I have created an infinity dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary art” (quoted in P. Campiglio, “I Only Believe in Art,” in op. cit., p. 196). With this radical new gesture, Fontana achieved a fundamental advancement for avant-garde art, his constellation of Buchi establishing an imaginative projection resembling a cosmic infinity across Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita.
Interspersed organically within the central passage of the work, contained by the innermost ring of Buchi, are a field of vibrant, glittering glass fragments embedded within the paint layers. Fontana termed these gemlike additions Pietre, and conceived them as a further spatial advancement from his Buchi which further expanded the theoretical spatiality of his work into a new dimension. The gleaning, semi-transparent glass casts alluring shadows across the tableau, integrating a sensational feeling of materiality into the work. This splendid embellishment, unlike the artist’s previous Pietre paintings, holds an iconographic significance here, as the bright gemlike forms immediately recall the Pala d’Oro, the elaborate high altar retable in Basilica di San Marco occupying the holiest space in the city, whose highly ornate Byzantine style entails a formidable quantity of enamels and precious stones set against a dark backdrop.
The Pietre and Buchi engage with each other to propagate an illusionary sense of infinite space, accentuating a spatial dynamism evocative of the powerful effects of the mosaics which adorn the interior of the basilica. Sourced directly from the famed Murano glassmakers Fucina degli Angeli and Venini, the Pietre are inextricably connected to Venice, the glass’s material and refractive qualities identical to the mosaics in San Marco. Describing Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco by Night with Teresita, Luca Massimo Barbero extolls “a ‘black light’ that vibrates with the device of the colored Pietre, like tesserae torn from a destroyed mosaic and tossed in the air” which formulates a sense of “the forms and rhythms of the empty spaces of the colonnades of the piazza,” the Baroque opulence and chromatic intensity of the ruby, citrine, and sapphire colored glass Pietre entrenching the work in a specifically Venetian mentality conceptually representing the magnificence of the city’s material culture (L. M. Barbero, op. cit., p. 36). Taken together, fluid black paint, Buchi, and Pietre operate in tandem, the sparkling glass stones and architectural holes set against the dark background conjuring an suggestive image approximative of piazza San Marco at night as if viewed from multiple viewpoints simultaneously.
Fontana first exhibited the original eleven works from the Venezie cycle—including the present work—at Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume, Palazzo Grassi in Venice. This was an apt homecoming for Fontana, whose original Concetti spaziali were first shown at the XXIV Venice Biennale in 1948. The artist had successfully presented his Natures series at Palazzo Grassi in 1960, which led to Paolo Marinotti, the influential collector and patron of the prestigious exhibition space, to invite Fontana to install an entire room for the important exhibition Arte e Contemplazione, a seismic international exhibition of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel curated by the influential French art critic Michel Tapié. Presented in dialogue with artists including Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Jean Dubuffet, and Antoni Tàpies, Fontana’s Venezie cycle was a radical advancement which fundamentally altered the course of the European avant-garde, charting the future course of contemporary art. Made both as an homage to the city, whose personal significance to the artist is made clear in the many autobiographical allusions made in his works’ titles, as well as a bold assertion of artistic independence, the Venezie captivated the exhibition’s audience, leading Tapié to laud the cycle’s ability to blend a poetics of human travails with that “mysterious uncertainty, high metaphysics of space… that raise the euphoric mood of Fontana to the level of novel delights” (M. Tapié, quoted in op. cit., p. 30).
The Venezie are almost unique in their explicit identification of a specific geography, a distinction shared only with Fontana’s interrelated New York cycle. Venice held immense artistic and personal significance to Fontana—he had first exhibited in the city at the XVII Biennale in 1930, and was included in every subsequent Biennale, as well as in frequent exhibitions through his Venetian dealer Carlo Cardazzo. Fontana and Teresita had honeymooned in Venice, and the couple frequently visited the city together, placing the romantic allusions in many of the Venezie cycle’s titles in a more poignantly personal key. Intimately familiar with Venice, Fontana viewed the city through a dialectic of international artistic exchange and encounter, the ultimate global stage in which artistic innovations where presented and digested in a serene setting imbued with the tangible artistic legacy of previous cultures. Fontana channeled and responded to the effects which the majestic city held on previous artists, spanning from the Bellini family and Carpaccio to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, to Canaletto and Guardi, as well as foreigners visiting the Serenissima including Turner and Monet.
Fontana held an intimate familiarity with these artists, having had his artistic formation at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, which holds a significant collection of these masters. The artist’s conception of the series as a cycle, first presented serially at Palazzo Grassi, invokes the particularly Venetian tradition of cycle painting, typified in Gentile Bellini’s True Cross Cycle and Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula Cycle. Fontana’s engagement with this artistic tradition, as well as with the subject of Venice more generally, was through the prism of cliché, embracing the city’s long history of kitsch literary and artistic emulations which began during the Great Tours of the nineteenth century and became amplified in the era of mass tourism. Massimo Barbero notes that Fontana’s Venezie tackled this Venetian imagery and symbolism “almost irreverently to strike an ambiguous balance between sentimentality and the redundancy of kitsch, verging on distain and irony. His notion of Venice was that of popular and literary Myth” (op. cit., p. 28).
Confronting the tangle of cultural predispositions and ancient legacies within this framework, Fontana achieved an exemplary discourse, which curator Enrico Crispolti describes as “a response to and in dialogue with the use of icons in the world of mass media, which played a decisive role in Pop imagery… and in particular in the more sensational iconic crystallizations of the New Yorkers (From Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol, from James Rosenquist to Tom Wesselmann)” (E. Crispolti, “The Originality of a Master of Anticipation,” in op. cit., p. 79). Fontana’s Venezie thus anticipates the sensational Pop works of Warhol and Lichtenstein, compellingly conveying the seeming dissymmetry between the art historical reverence for Venice with the vernacular response of mass tourism to the sites of the city. The present work is the most compelling Pop prototype within the Venezie series, as it tackles head-on the subject of piazza San Marco, one of the most famous, romantic, reproduced, and visited places in the world, frequented by over thirty million tourists a year. With his embrace of popular culture transmitted through historic Italian vessels, Fontana anticipates with Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita Warhol’s most significant works, such as his Mona Lisa and Last Supper series.
Fontana’s fascination with his materials similarly engages with the Venetian vista. Beyond the physical origin of his glass Pietre in the Venetian lagoon, his fascination with brightly colored materials recalls the revered tradition of polychrome imagery which the artist himself promulgates: “Polychrome sculpture has illustrious forbears—the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Assyrians, from cave painting to Renaissance sculpture” (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Braun, “The Juggler: Fontana’s Art under Italian Fascism,” in Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold, ed. I. Candela, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2019, p. 36). As the curator Iria Candela tellingly describes, “Fontana somehow retrieved a sentiment equivalent to the one that overwhelms the visitor in the interior of Saint Mark’s Basilica” with his Venezie, creating a holistic perception of integration and totality following from the Byzantine tradition, with “the line of art-historical influences in Fontana’s oeuvre stretch[ing] right back to Paleolithic cave paintings. Within that long history, his works represent the threshold of a new art sensibility” (I. Candela, “Fontana’s Odessey,” in op. cit., p. 27). Art Historian Emily Braun goes further, remarking how “Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, abstraction, realism, the primordial, the Baroque: Fontana’s juggling of styles and materials, his nimble gambol with fine art and popular culture,” propels the Venezie into a entirely new and unique artistic mode (E. Braun, “The Juggler,” op. cit., p. 36). Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita is emblematic of the sensibility which Crispolti ascribes to the artist’s most accomplished masterpieces: “In Fontana’s fever of imagination and innovation, therefore, it is possible to discern the intersection of trajectories of themes inherited from the past, ranging from the baroque expressionistic vitalism to spatial materismo informale, from Futurist cosmic imagination to Spazialismo of cosmic destiny” (E. Crispolti, “The Originality of a Master of Anticipation,” in op. cit., p. 64).
Fontana’s Venezie cycle reflected and innovated upon the entire art historical tradition, from Paleolithic cave paintings to Abstract Expressionism, and Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita is the pinnacle of this endeavor, its evocation of Saint Mark’s topography a fitting capstone to Fontana’s overall creative project. Piazza San Marco, the first and largest civic square in Italy, was the center of Venetian cultural hegemony. The square is an architectural pastiche of all the cultures which the city interacted with, requisitioning ancient Roman columns, relics from Egypt, architectural forms and supports from Byzantium, and decorative inspiration from the Islamic world into a wholly original mélange which proclaimed a modern Venetian sensibility to the world. Concetto spaziale, In piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita similarly couples a great variety of previous styles and movements into a thoroughly unique and prophetic assemble anticipating and informing later advancements in contemporary art. Pondering Fontana’s significant legacy, the curator Jan van der Marck assets how “Fontana’s contribution to the realm of visual ideas has helped set the scene for many of today’s experiments. For more intransigent artists, such as Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, or for the technically more ingenious Group Zero and Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, Fontana has been a direct inspiration and generous supporter” (J. van der Marck, Lucio Fontana: The Spatial Concept of Art, exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1966, n.p.).