Through the six 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. Belonging to the artist’s venerated series of tagli (cuts), executed in the decade between 1958 and 1968, these works represent Fontana’s transformative practice of defacing the canvas and treating space as both physical and philosophical concept. Here, the extraordinary configuration of slashes lends the work a highly unique compositional balance as the tagli dance between the boundaries of painting and sculpture, two- and three-dimensionality.

The present example is further distinguished by its pristine alabaster hue: the notion of purity is profoundly associated to Fontana’s celebrated white cuts, for the colour offered the artist the cleanest and most proficient channel for temporal and spatial meditations. Thus Fontana’s white monochrome aesthetic became a powerful tabula rasa; a blank slate awaiting dynamic action. An entire room of white tagli canvases were exhibited at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, where the all-consuming whiteness of each canvas intensified the depth and void of each violent incision. A similar all-white room was recreated in the artist’s 2019 retrospective Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold at The Met Breuer in New York, where the present work was exhibited. Perhaps reflecting on this work's radiant white surface, Fontana inscribed on the reverse, "Today is a beautiful sunny day." Moored by its conceptual rigour and held in the same private collects ion for over twenty years, Concetto spaziale, Attese illuminates the sense of heightened intensity and lyrical poignancy that cemented Fontana’s reputation as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

Though seemingly impulsive, the severe slashes on the surface of Fontana’s canvas are the result of a rational and surgical process of image-making. For the tagli series, Fontana’s gestural performance began by soaking his canvases with emulsion paint, which he then left to dry for several hours. After meticulously piercing the surface with a Stanley knife, he would open the cuts gently with the edge of his blade. As a final step, Fontana inserted black gauze as interfacing behind each incision to create the illusion of infinite 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. In her essay on the artist’s retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1977, art historian Erika Billeter wrote, “With one bold stroke 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” (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006-07, p. 21). Here, Fontana takes the very basis of painting, long regarded as an illusionistic portal or didactic vessel and, in a spectacular display of ingenuity and irreverence, defiles our exaltation of the picture plane.

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; this synthesis of movement, space and t.mes carried forward the aesthetic vocabulary of the Futurists at the beginning of the twentieth century. The earlier works of Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni offered similar meditations on motion, dynamism, energy and space, and Fontana’s tagli series build upon such considerations through a transformative system of pseudo-mechanic gesture. While 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 the present example’s palette: Fontana considered white the “purest, least complicated, most understandable color” (Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. I, Brussels 1974, p. 137). Historic associations of purity with the colour are perverted at the command of Fontana’s blade, as the canvas bears gouges which resemble the stigmata wounds which riddled the bodies of St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis of Assisi, and Christ himself.

While Fontana’s works juxtapose surface and depth, his compositions also unite tradition with contemporaneity. 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 immortalised. “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). Executed during the most formative decade of the artist’s career, Concetto spaziale, Attese exhibits Fontana’s negotiation with, and challenge to, traditional notions of painting, as well as the artist’s invention, freedom and willingness to subvert aesthetic boundaries. Here, Fontana’s viewer is made to look beyond the physical fact of painting, and to the philosophical notions of space without confinement and depth without boundaries.