Lucio Fontana

Milan, Vismara Arte Contemporanea, Itinerario: Arman, Arp, Fontana..., 1970

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 198, no. 68 T 29, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 683, no. 68 T 29, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 876, no. 68 T 29, illustrated

Twenty years before the execution of the present work, Fontana changed the course of Western art with one bold stroke: the piercing of the canvas.  In a single act he revolutionised the concept of the canvas as a vehicle for pictorial representation, and questioned the future of easel painting which hitherto had been a constant in the canon of art history.  Erika Billeter analyses Fontana's violation of the canvas, writing that it implies, 'both the termination of a five-hundred year evolution in Western painting and a new beginning, for destruction carries innovation in its wake' (Erika Billeter, 'Lucio Fontana: Between Tradition and Avant-Garde', Lucio Fontana, 1899-1968: A Retrospective, New York 1977, p. 13). Suddenly and immediately, the penetrated canvas becomes the work of art, the catalyst which would spark infinite future investigations into the realm of spatial possibility.   

The artistic theory behind the creation of the buchi (holes), then the tagli (cuts), was professed in Fontana's first manifesto, the Manifesto Blanco, published in 1946.  Here Fontana proposed the birth of a new 'spatialist' art, an art which would harness technological progression in its quest to articulate the 'fourth dimension'. The buchi, with their agitated surfaces, penetrated and decorated, illuminate this intangible place, where movement and time are captured in space. Fontana proposed the artist as the source of creative energy, anticipating future events and engaging with technological advancement. The artist's work should aspire to enlighten ordinary people to the possibilities offered by their environment and society.  Ceaselessly engaged with the scientific and technical evolutions achieved throughout the twentieth century, he incorporated these ideas into his art with a dynamic exploration of method, material and medium. A few years following the punctures and piercings of the buchi, Fontana sharpened his gesture: the elaboration of the hole finds its definitive expression in the elegantly vigorous tagli which would dominate Fontana's oeuvre thereafter.

Fontana began his process of making the slits by painting the canvas ground with industrial shop-bought emulsion in pure monochrome.  While the canvas surface was still damp he placed it on an easel and executed the cut with a Stanley-knife in a single, precise downward movement. The canvas was then left to dry, the incision in place. There was no room for error: if the cut deviated from Fontana's desired line, the entire canvas was discarded, the work destroyed. The cut, as unrepeatable as a brushstroke, could not be corrected.  Once the slit was made Fontana would enlarge the furrow with his hand, gently opening the sides of the cut in an act akin to a 'caress', as one close observer described it. To hold the cut in place, Fontana applied black gauze to the reverse, covering the cut from top to bottom. The final gesture would complete the work: the lightest touch of his hand would ease the edges of the incision slightly inwards, instilling a suggestion three dimensional form to the flat canvas.

With Concetto Spaziale, Attese, the viewer is presented with masterpiece from the series of tagli, where apparently abstract cuts elicit an intense emotional reaction from the viewer.  The ineluctable smoothness of the crimson pigment saturates the canvas like blood seeping from an open wound. Onto this seductive field of colour, seven precise and rhythmic incisions march across the surface, penetrating as they traverse the picture plane. Each slit is of almost equal length, the harmony deliberately upset by Fontana's angling of the second and sixth slit, and the squeezing constriction of three cuts in the centre. With nervous energy and dynamic force, space pulses through the openings. 

The striking colour of the red canvas ground is dramatic as it is symbolic: red carries a multitude of associations.  In religious imagery, red is the colour of Mary Magdalene's robes and is symbolic of Christ's Passion. Here, the blood-soaked canvas hosts seven wounds, a spiritually charged number, and resonant of the stigmata and lance wound suffered by Christ. We feel the sharpness of the cut, the dagger-like knife which slits and violates the pure unadulterated canvas field. The edges of each slit, as if recoiling from an assault, curl inwards creating rhythmic curved recessions leading our eye into the darkly imagined space beyond. Compositionally dynamic and mesmerising in its beauty, Concetto Spaziale, Attese embodies the artist's revolutionary spatial theories while engendering a unique dialogue with the symbolic value of colour and form.