How Italian Artist Lucio Fontana Tore Through the Fabric of Space and t.mes
Executed in 1965, Concetto spaziale, Teatrino is a masterful example of Lucio Fontana's Teatrini (Small Theatres), an elegant culmination of the artist's career-long investigation into space, form, and the concept of the infinite. Contained within a lacquered and shaped wooden frame, the pristine picture plane is punctured with a constellation of Fontana's signature buchi (holes), which pierce through to a conceptual infinite void that lies beyond the canvas surface. Created shortly after his acclaimed La fine di Dio cycle, Fontana's Teatrini are an extension of his desire to produce a physical landscape that embodies the notion of spatial infinity. In the present work, Fontana's ‘theatre’ evokes figurative allusions through the arboreal silhouettes of the wooden elements and the three-dimensional relationship between the frame and the punctured background ‘scenery.’ His spatial forms thus become an audience, bearing witness to the artist's spacialist investigations.
"The Teatrini were a type of ‘realistic Spatialism.’ A little bit in the fashion of Pop Art things too... but still in my way. They were forms that man imagines in space."
Reminiscent of a meticulously constructed theatre, as its title implies, the tangible depth and sculptural presence of Concetto spaziale, Teatrino heightens its captivating intensity. The viewer's gaze is immediately drawn to the arc of Fontana's buchi (holes), which mirrors an asterism of stars. Fontana sought to capture a fraction of cosmic space and a sense of its infinite expanse within this work. As described by Luca Massimo Barbero: "These works do not possess ‘theatricality’ in the sense that they are a story but respond to the artist's constant need to create an image that exists where everything is metaphorical, the fruit of fantasy and the memory of a possible future universe" (Luca Massimo Barbero quoted in: Exh. Cat., Mantova, Casa del Mantegna, Lucio Fontana. Teatrini, 1997, p. 13).
In staging his multi-dimensional quest to transcend the confines of the canvas ground through Concetto spaziale, Teatrino, Fontana invites a wooden chorus to join us in our awe and spectatorship of his spatial environments. Describings
the teatrini, Enrico Crispolti wrote: "the sharpness of the lacquered shaped frames and the clean grounds of sky traversed by ordered constellations of holes indicate a new desire to create an objectified configuration of a kind of spatial 'spectacle', which Fontana presents with an almost classical imaginative composure" (Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, vol. I, Milan 2006, p. 79).