"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..."
Through the twelve swiftly choreographed incisions which score the surface of Concetto Spaziale, Attese, Lucio Fontana asserts his most powerful contribution to twentieth century art: the rupture of the picture plane. The present work, executed in 1965, belongs to his celebrated tagli—or cuts—series, but Concetto Spaziale, Attese is distinguished particularly for its pristine alabaster field, which offers the artist the cleanest, most proficient channel for his meditations on space and seeing. Moored by its conceptual rigor and held in the same private collects ion for nearly thirty years, Concetto Spaziale, Attese exudes a quiet, near sepulchral majesty as it mourns the death of painting as we know it. If it were the Old Masters of the High Renaissance who constructed linear perspective, the legendary Impressionists who distilled the image into rippling color and light, the Cubists who shattered form and space, and the Abstract Expressionists who eschewed representation altogether, then it is Concetto Spaziale, Attese that allows for the total massacre of the surface to which Western art has been beholden for centuries.
Every slice to the surface remains a vestige of Fontana’s gestural performance, each encoded with a physicality that belies the compositional refinement of the work. He begins by soaking his canvas in emulsion paint; once dry, he slashes it with a Stanley knife before gently molding the cuts open with the edge of his blade. The two rows of cuts are thus a bravura exhibition of an unrepeatable moment, miraculously repeated. Fontana completes the work by placing strips of black gauze behind each incision, transforming each vent into an aperture of inconceivable depth. Borne out of a process hinged upon achieving the tenuous balance between the engineered and the aleatory, Concetto Spaziale, Attese takes on a sculptural quality, dancing between action and stasis, two and three dimensionality.
- 1933
- 1946
- 1947
- 1949
- 1958
- 1966
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1933Lucio Fontana in his Milan studio with Bagnante (Bather), 1933.
Lucio Fontana began as a sculptor in the early 1930s and 1940s. His initial works, rooted in the avant-garde, defied European sculptural tendencies by balancing the abstract and figurative, spatial and baroque.
Fontana’s sculptures were pivotal to his artistic evolution into painting; the sculptures are evidence of Fontana’s progressive, innovative approach to material. -
1946Manifesto Blanco, 1946
Fontana’s foray into his important Tagli (Cuts) works began in 1946, after the influential publishing of his first collaborative, theoretical text Manifesto Blanco, demanding a synthesis of artistic genres and renunciation of traditional materials.
“We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: colour, sound, movement, t.mes , space, integrated in physical and mental union. Colour, the element of space; sound, the element of t.mes and movement, which develops in t.mes and space. These are fundamental to the new art which encompasses the four dimensions of existence. t.mes and space.” -
1947The Spatialist movement
Fontana pioneered the Spatialist movement, which unified art and science to produce dynamic, physically engaging work for the mechanical age. Fontana wrote a formal Spatialist manifesto with peers of artists and critics in 1947, entitled Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo, which demanded a new form of space-oriented art. -
1949Fontana in the process of executing a Buchi.
By 1949, Fontana’s renunciation of illusory space and introduction of physical space in painting reached a turning point with his early Buchi (Holes) series. Composed of holes punched into canvas with an awl, the Buchi works laid the groundwork for Fontana’s exploration of surface manipulation and bold, physical alterations to the very structure of the canvas which he termed Concetto spaziale (1947–68). -
1958Concetto spaziale, Attese (T.104) (Concept spatial, Attentes), 1958. Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Fontana’s seminal Tagli paintings came to fruition in 1958, a major career milestone that displayed the artist’s radical gesture and embodied his Spatialist ideological stance. Slashing his canvases with a sharp Stanley knife, Fontana deliberately destroyed the flat picture plane. The first Tagli works were importantly exhibited in a one-man show at the Naviglio Gallery, Milan and shortly after at the Stadler Gallery, Paris in 1949. -
1966Lucio Fontana with his work at the Venice Biennale, 1966.
After a near-decade producing his iconic Tagli paintings and having prominent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Marlborough Gallery, New York; and Alexander Iolas Gallery, Paris; Fontana was awarded the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale.
His Tagli paintings cemented Spatialism in the canon and reinforced his revolutionary dialectic between painting and sculpture, surface and the void.
“My cuts are above all a philosophical stat.mes nt, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter; a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future.”
Here, Fontana takes the very basis long regarded as an illusionistic portal or didactic vessel and, in a spectacular display of ingenuity and irreverence, quite literally pierces through our exaltation of the picture plane. The so-called window represented by the canvas has been splintered, and what it contains, Fontana reveals, is only an immeasurable void. “With one bold stroke,” art historian Erika Billeter observed, “he pierces the canvas and tears it to shreds. Through this action he declares before the entire world that the canvas is no longer a pictorial vehicle and asserts that easel painting, a constant in art heretofore, is called into question. Implied in this gesture is 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 in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006-07, p. 21)
Fontana devised the theory behind his tagli in his Manifesto Blanco, published in 1946. Calling for a dialogue with the “dimensionality” of painting, Fontana proposed the concept of Spatialism. As artists in the United States concerned themselves with the liberation of gesture, Fontana sought to reinvent it altogether. The generative possibilities incited by this revolution in artistic creation are further underscored by Concetto Spaziale, Attese’s palette: the pristine white serves as a patient tabula rasa, a blank slate awaiting action. Fontana considered white the “purest, least complicated, most understandable color,” and in his celebrated installation for the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, chose exclusively to produce black slashes on white ground. (Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. I, Brussels 1974, p. 137) Historic associations of purity with the color are perverted at the command of Fontana’s blade, as the canvas bears gouges which resemble the stigmata which riddled the bodies of St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis of Assisi, and Christ himself.
“With the slash I invented a formula that I don’t think I can perfect. I managed with this formula to give the spectator an impression of spatial calm, of cosmic rigour, of serenity in infinity.”
Fontana draws upon codified artistic and theoretical lineages only to cast them to history; his tagli engender an ever-palpable present, in which the impression of severity and radicality in the present work are immortalized. “Art dies,” Fontana wrote in 1948, “but is saved by gesture.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana 1899-1968: A Retrospective, 1977, p. 19) Twelve t.mes s over in Concetto Spaziale, Attese, he proves this to be true. Compositional complexity and conceptual profundity find home in the present work—an utter triumph of invention which inaugurated a catalytic shift in twentieth century artmaking.
