Equal parts precious object and artistic treatise, the metallic pigment of Concetto Spaziale, 1961 offers a particularly profound summation of the conceptual catalyst that drove Fontana’s career-long investigation of space, fusing the devotional opulence of antiquity with the radical inquiries of mankind’s technological revolution in an ever-intensifying dialogue with the infinite tangibility of space. Symmetries impart a sense of order, and impressions of the artist’s fingertips laid into wet paint create a decorative regime. Variations in the thickness of paint are sculptural relief, and an oval border marked with a tool monumentalizes the central cut. As Fontana began again in the creation of the present Concetto Spaziale his blade ineluctably rupturing the radiant surface of the picture plane in pursuit of a new frontier of painterly process, he achieved immediate notoriety for what would become the most radical and categorically groundbreaking artistic gesture of recent art history.

Concetto Spaziale is thus characterized by a glossy, light-catching depth that the waterpaint of his Attese could never achieve. Ever inspired by the religious opulence of Venetian architecture, painting and sculpture, Fontana was undoubtedly attempting to replicate the visually commanding and spiritually enriching properties of Italian devotional art. Sarah Whitfield once perceptively observed that “underlying all of Fontana's art is the desire to find an imagery universal enough in its appeal to usurp centuries of Christian symbolism" (Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Hayward Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1999, p. 46). Far beyond a commitment to iconoclasm or atheism, Fontana repeatedly practiced his methods – the cut, the hole, the pietre, the metallic surface – with the dedication and varied repetition expressed in religious icons.

From his first, radical incision of the canvas, Fontana’s iconic rupture of the picture plane in the tagli paintings constituted a seminal redefinition of the conception of space within art. In their ritualistic gestural bravura, Fontana’s cuts drew upon the increasing focus on action and performance art building in Italy during 1957-58. Unmistakably wrought by a human hand, the slim fissure of the tagli through the luminous surface of the present work powerfully recalls the stigmata gouged into innumerable gilded altarpieces, the dark caesura a contemporary echo of the wounds of Christ on the cross. Fontana remarks, “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.” (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 23)

The indisputable tension between unity and rupture, beauty and brutality, transcendent serenity and unspeakable violence in Concetto Spaziale, Attesa appropriates the divine consequence of centuries old religious iconography in a thrilling inquiry of the infinite cosmos: an altarpiece for the modern age. Describings the allure metal held, as both medium and muse, for Fontana, scholar Luca Massimo Barbero remarks, “The artifice of metallic color, its mimetic, symbolic, reflective quality, had always fascinated Fontana: metal, the way light reflects from it and at the same t.mes penetrates, revealing its plasticity, had always represented a challenge for him…The silver and gold-colored Oils perfectly illustrate that sculptural ambiguity of his painting”. (Exh. Cat., Venice, Peggy Guggenheim collects ion, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2007, p. 24)

Fontana was dually explicit with regard to his emulation of the cosmic explorations of his era, and confident in the implication that his actions had for the aesthetic realm: "The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: thus I pierce this 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 cited in Exh. Cat., Venice, Peggy Guggenheim collects ion (and travelling), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 19) At a t.mes when space travel was looking less like science fiction and more like a tangible reality, the present work finds a means to enter the realm of the immaterial; not so much to define space as to re-define it, to open it up to a boundless array of possibilities. This work has the effect of marking an event, as it crosses the frontier towards a blinding conceptual and aesthetic point of no return: it collapses past, present and future within the slender abyss of a single cut.