Concetto spaziale

Concetto spaziale presents the viewer with a rich pink monochrome canvas which has been rent apart in the centre, creating a vivid, vertical fissure. One of the so-called Olii that Lucio Fontana created from the late 1950s and which exploded in the early 1960s and remained an important part of his work for the rest of his life, Concetto spaziale features the almost tactile surface area, with its clear marks from the artist, that distinguish this series.

The Olii were counterparts to the crisp Tagli, or 'Cuts', which Fontana was creating during the same period. The Tagli usually involved crisp, almost surgical slashes in the surface of canvases painted with uniform colour which was usually devoid of any trace of the artist's hand. The contrast with the Olii such as Concetto spaziale is immediately apparent: there is an abundance of materiality in the thick paint, especially where the canvas has been skilfully yet energetically torn in the centre and folds of impasto and support protrude. The wound-like hole that dominates the composition, recalling Italian paintings of the wounded Christ, has been created with a physical vigour similar to that seen in the Natura sculptures, which comprised large balls of clay featuring gouged-out craters. At the same time, the incised markings in the picture surface emphasise the degree to which Fontana has deliberately left his mark upon the picture. Rather than the near-clinical finish of the Tagli, in Concetto spaziale Fontana has ensured that the wavy lines and outlines, which have an unsteady feel, add a sense of nervous energy to the already hot pink of the surface. This is only emphasised by the explosive violence of the trench that has been gouged out so energetically from the surface.

In the Tagli and the Olii alike, Fontana was seeking a new visual language for the age of space travel. As he explained, 'The man of today... is too lost in a dimension that is immense for him, is too oppressed by the triumphs of science, is too dismayed by the inventions that follow one after the other, to recognise himself in figurative painting. What is wanted is an absolutely new language' (Fontana, quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 260). By 1962, when Concetto spaziale was made, science had reached new pinnacles. Mankind had escaped the embrace of planet Earth and had sent first satellites, then people, to Space. In April the previous year, Yuri Gagarin had soared above the Earth, humankind's first Cosmonaut, bolting through the void in orbit. That same orbit is echoed in the incised lines in Concetto spaziale: it is not a smooth orbit that Fontana depicts, but a more unsteady, unsettling one.

Fontana's Tagli expressed the serene side of space travel and the new scientific age, of a spiritual transcendence brought about through technology, as Man reached new heady evolutionary heights. By contrast, the Olii, with their flashes of near-expressionism in their eloquent shaky sense of line and the massy folds of their gashes, reveal a more anxious side to the new age of man. Fontana himself would explain of pink works such as Concetto spaziale:

'The colour of the grounds of these canvases is a bit loud... [The colour choice] indicates the restlessness of contemporary Man. The subtle tracing, on the other hand, is the walk of Man in space, his dismay and fear of getting lost; the slash, finally, is a sudden cry of pain, the final gesture of anxiety that has already become unbearable' (Fontana, quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p, 90).

The eloquence and lyricism with which Fontana has expressed these concepts in Concetto spaziale is heightened by the rich pink, which evokes flesh tones. Fontana himself described the pink of the Olii in Milanese dialect as, 'la rosa di mutand di don', or the pink of ladies' underwear, heightening the sensual dimension that is only underscored by the suggestive physicality of the rift at the centre of Concetto spaziale (Fontana, quoted in ibid., p. 94). It is telling that Concetto spaziale dates from 1962, the year after Fontana had truly honed his powers of expression in the Olii he created devoted to the theme of Venice. In Concetto spaziale, Fontana has taken the hint of geographical content of some of the Venezia series, as well as the sheer gestural physicality of the surface, and has combined them in order to create a work that lyrically expresses the notion of man in space, albeit in a way that is grounded in very human angst, yet which in its sheer boldness also introduces a rich and visceral sense of the revelatory ecstasy of entering a new age and a new awareness.