Lucio Fontana

Mario Oliveri, Milan
Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner
Thence by descent to the present owner

Zurich, Kunsthaus, Lucio Fontana, 1976, p. 22, no. 35, illustrated

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana 1899-1968: A Retrospective, 1977, p. 54, no. 45, illustrated

Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Fontana, 1980, p. 51, no. 21, illustrated, and p. 391, illustrated in colour

Madrid, Palacio de Velásquez, Lucio Fontana. El Espacio Como Exploración, 1982, p. 52, no. 20, illustrated

Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou; Barcelona, Fondation Caixa de Pensions; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Whitechapel Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1987-8, p. 190, illustrated in colour (Paris catalogue), and p. 50. no. 58, illustrated (Amsterdam and London catalogue)

Prato, Museo Pecci, Burri e Fontana 1949-1968, 1996, p. 152, no. 9, illustrated in colour

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Lucio Fontana, 1998, p. 200, illustrated in colour

Milan, Museo Diocesano, Lucio Fontana: Centenario della Nascita, Cinque Mostre a Milano, 1999, p. 246, no. III/55, illustrated in colour

Milan, Amedeo Porro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Carriera "barocca" di Fontana, 2004-5, p. 39, illustrated in colour

London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Lucio Fontana: Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings, 2005, p. 39, illustrated in colour

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 49, no. 56 BA 13, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 172, no. 56 BA 13, illustrated

Carnet, no. 4, Milan 1994, p. 31, illustrated in colour 

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 323, no. 56 BA 13, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter in the original. The illustration fails to convey to the fine texture of the sediment, and iridescent qualities of the silver paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals that the lowermost pietre, illustrated in the earliest edition of the Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, has been lost. Very close inspection reveals a thin and short repaired tear to the bottom right of the unpainted canvas. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
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Concetto Spaziale, L’Inferno is among the rarest and most unique works in Lucio Fontana’s celebrated oeuvre. Executed in 1956, the present work and its contemporaneous pendant Concetto Spaziale, Paradiso, are two of only four rhomboidal paintings ever created by the artist. Their paired invocation of a powerful and imagery-rich trope – heaven and hell – is remarkable given the paucity of overt subject matter or direct literary reference across Fontana’s output. Extensively exhibited at renowned venues including the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Concetto Spaziale, L’Inferno is a masterpiece attesting to Fontana’s profound engagement with religious and metaphysical philosophies.
Beneath the shifting, swirling applications of white, grey, and black paint mixed with softly metallic and textured sediments, a vertical passage of unpainted canvas is scattered with bucchi (holes) and opaque pietre (stones). This portal is then framed by heavily impastoed ornamental embellishments of dark red-inflected oil paint, coming to a point at the top centre. It is impossible not to recall Auguste Rodin’s magnum opus The Gates of Hell (1880 - c.1890), whose towering and dynamic bronze forms are inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Fourteenth Century text The Divine Comedy. Divided into three parts titled Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, this rich keystone of the Western literary canon recorded the medieval Catholic world-view and allegorically depicted a soul’s movement towards the divine. Influenced in Argentina and Italy by this rich intellectual legacy, Fontana’s Spatialist goal to push through the canvas and pursue its mysterious side is not unlike Dante’s quest.  
Concetto Spaziale, L’Inferno stands out among Barocchi (‘the Baroque ones’), a series completed between 1954 and 1957, whose gestural, explosive, and abundantly painted surfaces channel the feverish forms of the Baroque. Fontana deeply admired this idiom’s ability to depict objects and abstract shapes in vigorous movement through space. Created partly alongside the Pietre canvases, executed between 1954 and 1957, certain Barocchi such as the present work were also singled out by Fontana to include chunks of Murano glass. Whereas typically the translucent glass fragments activate light across the canvas, the pietre of Concetto Spaziale, L’Inferno would seem to absorb rather than reflect light, communicating an abyssal depth in place of a sparkling surface.
Nourished by Catholic patronage, Baroque artists strove to capture the rapturous and revelatory aspects of religious life. This inflection undoubtedly stimulated Fontana’s interest, as it mirrored the mystical aspirations of his own art. Arguing that traditional religious imagery was outdated in the Twentieth Century, Fontana said: “God is nothing… I do not believe in gods on earth, it is inadmissible, there can be prophets, but not gods, God is invisible, God is inconceivable, therefore, today an artist cannot represent God on a chair with the world in his palm and a beard… It is in this, that religions must adapt themselves to the discoveries of science… because the universe proves that it is in itself infinite, and that the infinite is nothingness…” (the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Amedeo Porro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea; London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Lucio Fontana, Sedici Sculture 1937-67, 2007, pp. 31-3). As ever, divinity for Fontana was to be found in the far reaches of ‘space’ – whether the space behind the canvas or, in more concrete terms, the unknown of cosmological space itself. Upon slashing and puncturing his canvas, Fontana declared: “I have created an infinite dimension” (the artist quoted in: Carla Lonzo, Autoritratto, Bari 1969, p. 169).
Fontana returned to religious, and particularly Catholic, imagery throughout his career. In the 1940s he created series of ceramic sculptures depicting religious figures, sometimes Christ himself, and the later Fine di Dio series begun in 1963 was in fact prompted by a commission to illustrate the Bible. Similarly, his 1966 presentation at the Venice Biennale harkened to Modernist chapel architecture: a large room populated by single, iconic white Tagli, each encapsulated by a unique devotional recess. Weighing the contemplative serenity of such creations against the violence of Fontana’s destructive gestures, Andrew Graham-Dixon has remarked: “like the Roman Catholic faith itself, Fontana’s art oscillates between intimations of mystical, out-of-body experience and a countervailingly intense world of suffering and pain” (Andrew Graham-Dixon, “Lucio Fonata: At the Roots of Spatialism,” The Estorick Collection, 8 July 2007). Concetto Spaziale, L’Inferno captures the tension of this duality, its churning and swelling passages of pigment relating a restless and striving soul. Compellingly encapsulating Fontana’s dialogue with Catholic metaphysics and iconography, the present work is a magnificent tour-de-force of his endlessly innovating sensibility.