How Italian Artist Lucio Fontana Tore Through the Fabric of Space and t.mes

With its enigmatic black surface punctured by swirling constellations of green-rimmed holes, Concetto spaziale is a rare and exceptional large-scale work from Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary series of Olii (‘oils’). Extending two metres in both height and width, it stands amongst the largest and most sophisticated canvases of the artist’s oeuvre, immersing the viewer in a mysterious galactic void. Executed in 1960 and held in the same distinguished private collects ion for over six decades, the palpable materiality of the present work anticipates the virtuosic surfaces of Fontana’s career-defining opus La Fine di Dio. The pinnacle of this Spatialist project was expressed most purely for Fontana in the creation of the hole, the penetration of the traditional flat plane of the medium, which opened up the material of the canvas and infused it with the space endlessly expanding behind, around, and through it. By combining his signature Buchi (‘holes’) with a dense impasto of oil, Fontana brings together in this canvas both his spatial explorations and his interest in the materiality of paint. Prominently exhibited across Europe since its execution, this remarkable, singular vision epitomises the very essence of Fontana’s iconic career, which, in transcending conventional modes of artistic expression, investigated the infinite potential of space and matter.

Fontana began creating his Buchi in 1948, inaugurating what was to become one of the twentieth century’s most radical gestures. These punctures ruptured not only the canvas itself, but the traditional boundary between painting and sculpture, bringing a new dimension to art. As Fontana himself explained, “When I hit the canvas, I sensed that I had made an important gesture. It was, in fact, not an incidental hole, it was a conscious hole: by making a hole in the picture I found a new dimension in the void. By making holes in the picture I invented the fourth dimension” (the artist quoted in Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 21). In the present work, each hole vibrates with quivering motion as if just pierced by the artist in his frenzied attempts to access the void of space latent behind the surface. In this sense, Fontana's punctures serve as windows onto the concept of the infinite, with Concetto spaziale articulating the genesis of a new form of artistic expression.

Laying the foundations for his revolutionary practice in the Manifesto Blanco, published in 1946 in his native Argentina, he further elucidated his defining Concetti spaziali in the Primo manifesto dello Spazialismo after moving back to Milan in 1947. His goal would be to “unchain art from matter” so it might correspond to the advances of science and technology in the t.mes of the Atomic Age. Like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, Fontana’s texts express a desire for change in cultural practices to align with contemporary mechanical innovations: “We call for a change in essence and form. We demand the overcoming of painting, sculpture, poetry, music. An art more closely aligned with the demands of the new spirit is required” (Lucio Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, n.p.). Driven by his quest for a new visual idiom befitting the radical scientific, cultural, and philosophical shifts brought on by the nascent Space Age, Fontana conceived the penetration of the canvas as the ultimate negation of pictorial representation, seeking instead an artistic gestalt that could express the whole of existence: a synthesis of colour, movement, t.mes and space. Erika Billeter commented on the ground-breaking importance of Fontana’s first perforation of the canvas: “Lucio Fontana in 1948 challenges the history of painting. With one bold stroke he pierces the canvas and tears it to shreds… 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., Venice, Peggy Guggenheim collects ion, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006-07, p. 21). In this way, the invention of the hole irrevocably altered preconceptions of art's permanency, opening into the infinite space beyond the canvas and infusing it with conceptual dynamism.

The present work is situated at a critical juncture in this trajectory. After a two-year break within his cycle of buchi, Fontana had returned to the technique in 1955 with renewed purpose, before introducing in 1958 his iconic tagli (‘cuts’), created by sweeping a knife through the surface of the picture plane. By 1960, inspired by the effects of these innovations, Fontana was producing some of his most complex and ambitious canvases, creating spectacular rhythmic systems of perforations that seemed ever-more lyrical in structure. With Olii works like the present, Fontana recommits to the materiality of his media, forgoing the opacity and uniformity of his signature waterpaint in favour of the ductility and brilliance of oil. He was fascinated by the texture and malleability of the slightly plastic oil paint, particularly suitable for making visible gestures such as scratches, piercing or cuts. Recalling the tactility of his early sculptures in bronze, the visceral cuts and projections of the thickly applied paint invoke the sensual, carnal, and painful emotions of man’s existential condition. Indeed, in describings his transition between the Tagli and the Olii Fontana explained: “The cuts that I have made so far represent above all a philosophical space. But that which I am seeking, now, is no longer philosophical space but rather physical space… It is a human dimension that can generate physiological pain, a terror in the mind, and I, in my most recent canvases, am trying to give form to this sensation” (the artist quoted in Grazia Livi, “Incontro con Lucio Fontana,” Vanita, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 55).

In Concetto spaziale, the surface materiality is brought to the fore, as the viscous top layer of black is gouged to reveal underlying layers of emerald green, evoking a powerful alchemical unity of earth and cosmos. Many critics have also drawn a parallel between Fontana’s bodily punctures and the stigmata wounds of Christ, in their symbolism of man’s spiritual release from matter. Fontana himself described the bold colours in his Olii series as a reflection of the "restlessness of contemporary man.” He explained that "the color of the grounds of these canvases is a bit loud… [indicating] the restlessness of contemporary man. The subtle tracing, on the other hand, is the walk of man in space, his dismay and fear of getting lost; the slash, finally, is a sudden cry of pain, the final gesture of anxiety that has already become unbearable" (the artist quoted in Gottschaller, Op. cit., p. 90). Through these raw gestures, Fontana gives voice to the existential anxieties and triumphs of modern existence, creating a visual language that transcends tradition to express both the chaos and potential of the human experience.

In this aspect Concetto spaziale foreshadows Fontana’s landmark cycle La Fine di Dio, created between 1963 and 1964. In these otherworldly creations, defined by their distinctive ovoid-shaped canvases, the buchi reached their apotheosis, mutating into giant, fist-sized craters that the artist forged using his bare hands. While many of the present work’s holes are small, neat punctures, others broaden into deeper, wider incisions, emphasised by the sculptural impasto of startling green. Concentrated into a central ovoid form, the circular arrangement of activity is prophetic of the Cosmic Egg shape of the Fine di Dio, intended to invoke genesis, rebirth, and the origins of the universe. Here, too, creation and destruction are bound together as twin forces, each hole simultaneously an act of negation and discovery. More than any other series, the Olii epitomise Fontana’s fascination with the cosmic universe and form a potent representation of evocative dichotomies. In a combination of surface and depth, aesthetics and philosophy, carnal sensuality and scientific rigor, Concetto spaziale forms a mosaic of Fontana’s rich inspirations that culminate in an emotive visual sensation.