LUCIO FONTANA (1899-1968)

Created in 1955, Concetto spaziale is an early example of Lucio Fontana’s radical approach. Against an impasto surface of golden-brown, the artist pierces a constellation of buchi or holes, a technique he had begun experimenting with more than five years prior. With this gesture, Fontana succeeded in transforming the two-dimensional surface of the canvas – the traditional site of artistic creation – into a three-dimensional object that both relates to and encompasses the surrounding space. The buchi were the first artistic manifestation of Spatialism, Fontana’s aesthetic credo which called for a new art which responded to the innovations of the era. Captivated by the scientific and technological discoveries of the post-war period, Fontana believed that art needed to embody the spirit of the times. Indeed, the 1950s were a ground-breaking decade for conceptual art, one which saw the proliferation of Yves Klein’s monochromatic experimentations, the birth of Piero Manzoni’s Achromes, as well as the maturation of Fontana’s buchi.

In his Manifesto Blanco, Fontana wrote, ‘The discovery of new physical forces, control over matter and space gradually impose conditions that have never existed in the whole course of history … Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist. (L. Fontana, ‘Manifesto Blanco’, 1946, in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 116). Through his canvas punctures, Fontana found he could introduce space into the flattened pictorial plane; in their grasp towards the cosmos’s infinite expanse, the buchi were the earliest expression of this aesthetic theorisation. ‘When I hit the canvas,’ Fontana recalled, ‘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’ (L. Fontana, quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 21).