“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.”
Elegant and immediately impactful, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale is a unique and outstanding example of the artist’s career-long investigation of space. Executed between 1960 and 1966, the ceramic sculpture exudes Fontana’s highly physical mode of sculptural production. Gaping open along a frayed seam, the present work ruptures the boundary between outside and inside, solid and void, confusing the viewer’s somatic experience of the three-dimensional form. Characterised by a glossy, light-catching depth of the smooth glazed surface, the three-dimensional surface of Concetto Spaziale adjusts to the viewer's eye as they move around the work, creating an unparalleled interaction and experience.
The “Spazialismo” movement was founded by Lucio Fontana in 1947 in the context of the technological and scientific advances that culminated in the space race between the US and the USSR during the Cold War. The artist placed cosmic and material space in relation to each other at the heart of his work, with the aim of materialising space, rendering the invisible visible. In his Manifiesto Bianco, published in 1946, Fontana proposed the birth of a new Spatialist art, which sought to articulate the fourth dimension. In this quest, Fontana proposed the artist as the source of creative energy, anticipating future events and engaging with technological advancement; asserting that the artist’s work should aspire to enlighten ordinary people to the possibilities offered by their environment and society. Concetto Spaziale is imbued with a sense of the extraterrestrial, and the infinite and mysterious dimensions of space.
Being above all a sculptor, Fontana began his artistic career making funerary busts at his family’s business. The artist began to experiment with styles and techniques beyond the Accademia’s formalist curriculum during his second year at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. As Fontana recalled in an interview some years later: “I took a great lump of plaster, gave it the rough shape of a seated man and then threw tar over it. Just like that, as a violent reaction” (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Jole De Sanna, Lucio Fontana: Materia Spazio Concetto, Milan 1993, p. 10). Rejecting traditional sculptural materials such as marble or bronze, Fontana found an expressive capacity in plaster and wet clay. Imbued with a deep and inherent sense of fecundity that is nonetheless riven by external forces, the present work is both pregnant yet ripped in two; fertile yet ravaged by humanity’s newly discovered place in an absolutely vast and indifferent universe.