LUCIO FONTANA (1899-1968)

Conceived in 1959, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Natura contains the universe, its stony façade delicately split to reveal an abyss of black: a tactile smear, an undulating slash. Like a primordial talisman or a remnant from the origins of the universe, Concetto Spaziale, Natura is otherworldly and unfathomable, as ancient as the astral expanse. The work is part of Fontana’s celebrated Natura cycle, in which the artist dramatically realised his Spacialist idiom in three dimensions; editions of the Natura are held in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. The series was inspired by new, unexplored territories: ‘I was thinking of those worlds,’ said Fontana. ‘Of the moon with these... holes, this terrible silence that causes anguish, and the astronauts in a new world… These immense things have been there for billions of years... man arrives, in mortal silence, in this anguish, and leaves a vital sign of his arrival... they were these still forms with a sign of wanting to make inert matter live, weren't they?’ (L. Fontana quoted in, Lucio Fontana: Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings, exh. cat., Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, 2005, p. 79). Fontana began the Natura during a period of immense technological development worldwide: the international Space Race had begun in 1957, when Sputnik, the first satellite, was launched into orbit by the USSR. Appearing like a cosmological shard, a fragment captured by gravity, Concetto spaziale, Natura evokes a lunar presence, its surface seemingly worn down and eroded by centuries of cosmological forces. Here is a piece of infinity.