Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1960

1960

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

50 × 60 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-149819

An outstanding example of Lucio Fontana’s seminal series of buchi or ‘holes’, described in the artist’s catalogue raisonné as ‘copper’ colour, Concetto Spaziale (1960’s) thrusts the picture plane into new dimensions, epitomizing the artist’s quest to synthesize a new art for the Space Age. Completed in the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first man to be sent into outer space, rhythmic incisions and punctures run through the canvas to expose its three-dimensional existence, posing at once a destruction of traditional art and the creation of a radical new aesthetic concept. ‘When I hit the canvas,’ Fontana explained, ‘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). The holes are grouped in a manner that recalls a linear constellation or galaxy which in its linear form takes a mathematical structure like few in his works, while Fontana’s rich, metallic impasto brings forth the earthy texture of a planet’s surface: the celestial pierces the terrestrial in a thrilling ruptured topography, capturing the inspiring sense of discovery that heralded an age of cosmic exploration. The mysterious chasm of space, in all its enigmatic and eternal darkness, is brought into conversation with geological expanses of time as well as the swift human motion of Fontana perforating his canvas. Concetto Spaziale is gestural and astral, organic and futuristic, primal and revolutionary. Man enters space: Fontana transcends the canvas, and brings space itself into art.