Lucio Fontana

Esselier Collection, Zurich
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Brussels 1974, Vol. II, pp. 142-3, no. 66-67 O 3, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti,  Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Milan 1986, Vol. II, p. 493, no. 66-67 O 3, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Ragionato, Milan 2006, Vol. II, p. 684, no. 66-67 O 3, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a light canvas draw to the right corner. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a very small spot of retouching to the centre of the upper right quadrant.
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"I make a hole in a canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface" (the artist in conversation with Tommaso Trini, July 19, 1968, in Exhibition Catalogue, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1988, p. 34).

Executed in 1966, at the height of the artist's career Concetto Spaziale presents a vision of large ambitions. The exceptional beauty and presence, with such tactile surface, of the present piece handles a fundamental Modernist question as to the status of the artist's touch: without doubt, Fontana's background as a sculptor reinvigorated the importance of facture within conceptual art, and nowhere is it better materialised than in the present piece, a triumphant meeting place for the solid and the void, the tactile and the abstract.

Here the sheer energy of Fontana's process harnesses an enigmatic combination of violence and delicacy. The sheen of the oil paint lends the piece a vitality enhanced by the rosy pigment, and immediately the piece commands a thrilling juxtaposition of delicate colouring and the violation inflicted by the artist. Fontana has torn holes in the canvas and then thrust his hands in while the paint was still wet. A look towards outer space is focussed by the circular form that orbits the eruption of holes in the middle. By 1961, with Yuri Gagarin launched as the first person into space, Spatialism was confirmed as one of the most momentous concepts of the twentieth century art theory, regarding art as a channel for the concerns of mankind on the most universal scale. 'The discovery of the Cosmos is a new dimension, it is the Infinite: so I make a hole in the canvas, which is the basis for all previous art, to search for an infinite dimension, an X which for me is the basis of all Contemporary Art' (Fontana interviewed by Carla Lonzi in: Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto, Bari 1969, p.169).

The artist's return to Italy from Buenos Aires in 1947 had marked the beginning of a move towards abstraction, turning his back on figurative art and painterly convention to the point that even the two-dimensional plane was not enough. Fixated on the principle that in the space age the artwork should dynamically transform the space by which it is defined, he was spurred to produce an astonishingly forceful series works in a range of media and underpinned by a rare conceptual integrity, from 'Buchi' (holes) to 'Pietre' (stones), 'Gessi' (chalks), 'Inchiostri' (inks), 'Tagli' (cuts) and 'Nature' (natures). The formal purity running through each sequence brings out the idiosyncrasy of the given material, by which the classic epithet of modernist sculpture, 'truth to materials', is channelled into the conceptual realm.

The hole in the present piece sublimes both concerns of painting and sculpture: 'Sculpture and painting are both things of the past...we need a new form. Art that's movement. Art within space.' (Hedy. A. Giusti, 'But Nobody Mentions Milan Art', Rome Daily American 9 July 1954, in Anthony White, 'Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch' in Grey Room no. 5, Autumn 2001, p.56). Fontana is making a return to oil on canvas in conscious reassessment of the fallen condition of painting. Feeling his way between paint and form, the canvas becomes a three-dimensional site for their conjunction. The oil paint itself becomes a sculptural material, dragged by the artist's fingers in sensual furrows towards the gaps. A piece that explores the rebirth of painting and sculpture as one, Fontana appears to be ripping through the pink icing on a creamy surface in an extraordinary celebration of his conceptual breakthrough.

Ultimately the canvas here documents Fontana's ability to seize hold of an idea, and to visualise it in terms that are both visceral and powerfully muscular. The physicality of his conceptual process, realized with unerring tactility, endures in what amounts to a profoundly moving visual experience.