Lucio Fontana

Galleria Pagani del Grattacielo, Milan

Giulio Marelli, Bergamo

Alberto Valerio, Brescia

Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in the late 1970s)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 184, no. 66 T 65, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Fontana: Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 641, no. 66 T 65, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 837, no. 66 T 65, illustrated

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some minor wear to the top two and bottom left corners tips. There are two light handling marks to the lower centre of the right edge. Further inspection reveals a short minute hairline scratch to the bottom right corner with a few minute spots of possible inpainting which fluoresce lighter under ultra-violet light.
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Concetto Spaziale, Attese is a stunning example of Lucio Fontana’s most famous and desirable series. Featuring a background of deep unblemished saturated scarlet, and six dramatic cuts that fill the composition with energy and dynamism, this work is absolutely in keeping with the very best of this artist’s production. Executed in 1966, the same year that Fontana won the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale and only two years before his death, this magnificent work aptly demonstrates the creative acuity that the artist achieved in the last phase of his life.

The Taglio (cut) was Fontana’s most relied upon motif and the central tool with which he explored the physicality of the canvas. In the present work, the tagli are exceptional for their subtle grace: the minute variations between each line in length, breadth, and curve impart a sense of rhythm, of crescendo and diminuendo. These marks are as much recorded passages of action through time as they are articulations of three-dimensional space. Their manual realisation is wholly bonded with their aesthetic and the sense of sculptural confidence that they evoke confirms this as the work of an artist at the height of his powers.

By the 1960s, Fontana’s practice of breaking through the canvas and into a heretofore unexplored territory behind it had gained newfound relevance alongside ground-breaking concurrent advances in space travel. The ‘Space Race’ had established the moon as the next frontier for human exploration and dominated the global political zeitgeist. As such, Fontana was at pains to emulate this scientific paradigm shift in his artistry: just as Yuri Gagarin broke through the atmosphere to reveal the infinite oblivion of the cosmos, he sliced open his canvas to reveal the void behind it and irrevocably changed the course of art. To this end, the telleta (the strips of black gauze positioned behind each cut) are as central to the interpretation of this work as the narrow slits themselves. They imply the blackness of space and the insurmountable nothingness of the cosmological void. Fontana was explicit with regard to his emulation of the cosmic explorers of his era, and confident in the implication that his actions had for the course of art history: “The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: thus I pierce the canvas, which is the basis of all arts and I have created an infinite dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary Art” (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggneheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 19).

Hence Fontana positioned himself at the hereditary seat of Italian contemporary art; his oeuvre became the source from whence all of its creative streams flowed. To do so was not only a bold move of self-aggrandisement, but also, by necessity, a rejection of the traditions of his cultural heritage. For centuries, Italian painting had been about modelling in oils, perfecting chiaroscuro, and forming a delicate contrast between light and shade. To then present a work that was so chromatically flat and unblemished, as in the case of the deep red of the present work, was radical. Furthermore, as an Italian painter, Fontana was a direct successor to the innovators of linear perspective and the heir to a tradition based almost entirely on recession through the picture plane. By then cutting into his canvas, Fontana eschewed that construct, and smashed the window that the Italian viewer was so comfortably accustomed to looking through: “making a hole was a radical gesture which broke the space of the canvas as if to say: after this we are free to do what we like” (Lucio Fontana in conversation with Daniele Palazzoli, Bit, No. 5, Milan, October-November 1967).

Despite its intimations of infinite cosmological serenity, a sense of physical violence is inherent to Concetto Spaziale, Attese. The six striations that permeate its surfaces are unmistakably cuts wrought by a human hand; their wound-like appearance is enhanced by the ineluctable smoothness of the pulsating red pigment, saturating the canvas and seeping from each cut. In this way, the present work almost appears as a contemporary echo of the wounds of Christ on the cross. Christian art delivered the message of salvation through sacrifice, just as in Fontana’s work it is only by enacting violence on an unblemished surface that the intimation of a new dimension can be attained. In this work, Fontana denigrates the techniques of the Christian art tradition – perspectival recession, oil paint modelling – whilst simultaneously updating and recapitulating that Christian notion of achieving transfiguration through pain and sacrifice.

Concetto Spaziale, Attese is a work that distils the past, present, and future into a captivating composition of striking simplicity; a prime example of the manner in which Lucio Fontana was able to instigate a paradigm shift in post-war art, galvanising the discourse to keep up with concurrent progressions in space travel. It is works of this nature and of this exceptional quality and rarity that have installed Fontana’s oeuvre at the pinnacle of Italian post-war art.