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Lot Essay
Penetrating a verdant green background, row upon row of perforations has been arranged in an elliptic shape in Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale. Around the rows of punctures is a delicate line, surrounding them, harnessing them, corralling them. This line gives the sense that the viewer is looking upon the analogue of some sort of celestial body, an oval, egg-like world of green holes within a green universe. Perhaps this is a Spatial metaphor for the Earth itself, created while the Space Race was reaching a new crescendo with the USA and the USSR competing to throw rockets and astronauts into space, each trying to trump the last. Is this some response to the photographs of the Earth from space, presented as a large orb hanging in the void?
The green background of Concetto spaziale introduces the notion of Nature, of foliage, of life. At the same time, its insistent and even monochrome allows Fontana to pay tribute to two other younger artists who had both embraced single-coloured canvases in their works, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. The rows of holes in this work even echo the pleats in some of Manzoni's celebrated Achromes.
The green in Concetto spaziale has been applied in such a way as to negate the present of the artist's hand. There is an avoidance of materiality in the surface colour; at the same time, that materiality is underlined by Fontana's other interventions with the canvas. The deliberately and lyrically trembling line that circumscribes the holes, and of course the holes themselves, all speak of the efforts and direct intervention of the artist himself. Fontana has taken the green surface, perhaps reminiscent of the landscape paintings of old, and has opened it up through his repeated incisions. The novelty of Fontana's holes had a particular relevance in an age which had seen the boundaries of mankind tumbling, against a backdrop of rockets, televisions, computers and other advances. Opening the surface of the canvas provided an artistic parallel to those changes in the landscape of human existence in the modern world. As Fontana explained in an interview with Tommaso Trini given in the year that Concetto spaziale was created:
'I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface’ (Fontana, quoted in T. Trini, ‘The last interview given by Fontana’, pp. 34-36, W. Beeren & N. Serota (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Amsterdam & London, 1988, p. 34).
The green background of Concetto spaziale introduces the notion of Nature, of foliage, of life. At the same time, its insistent and even monochrome allows Fontana to pay tribute to two other younger artists who had both embraced single-coloured canvases in their works, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. The rows of holes in this work even echo the pleats in some of Manzoni's celebrated Achromes.
The green in Concetto spaziale has been applied in such a way as to negate the present of the artist's hand. There is an avoidance of materiality in the surface colour; at the same time, that materiality is underlined by Fontana's other interventions with the canvas. The deliberately and lyrically trembling line that circumscribes the holes, and of course the holes themselves, all speak of the efforts and direct intervention of the artist himself. Fontana has taken the green surface, perhaps reminiscent of the landscape paintings of old, and has opened it up through his repeated incisions. The novelty of Fontana's holes had a particular relevance in an age which had seen the boundaries of mankind tumbling, against a backdrop of rockets, televisions, computers and other advances. Opening the surface of the canvas provided an artistic parallel to those changes in the landscape of human existence in the modern world. As Fontana explained in an interview with Tommaso Trini given in the year that Concetto spaziale was created:
'I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface’ (Fontana, quoted in T. Trini, ‘The last interview given by Fontana’, pp. 34-36, W. Beeren & N. Serota (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Amsterdam & London, 1988, p. 34).