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拍品专文
Against a dark background, a meandering progression of holes introduces an intriguing play of light in Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale. In this work, Fontana has sought expression of Spatial Art through deliberately limited means, with the sinuous trail of perforations leaving much of the picture surface untouched, emphasising its monochrome status. The apertures in Concetto spaziale are restrained interventions, snaking their way across the canvas. They punctuate the surface, serving as a counterpoint that emphasises the darkness behind. At the same time, these punctures cause shadow and reflection, bringing the viewer's attention to the pierced picture surface, highlighting the three-dimensional nature of the flat canvas and the presence of that infinitely deep universe behind it. This work is a lyrical expression of the Spatial concepts that Fontana had propagated and disseminated. The fact that the holes form their own constellation heightens the connection between Concetto spaziale and the Cosmos.
That link to space is itself telling. Concetto spaziale features the holes forming a curved line across the surface that echoes constellations. Indeed, while the ancients looked at the stars in the night sky and identified them by picking out patterns and likenesses between the distant dots of light, so too Fontana encourages his viewers to read this image as though it were anchored in the realm of the figurative. Its curves hint at Nature and natural forms. Fontana has invoked the loose writing of the universe around us in this pattern. And that Spatial topic was all the more pertinent during 1961, the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space.
Intriguingly, it would appear to be partly on the basis of the rigorous simplicity of the composition, with its serpentine line of holes against the monochrome background that resulted in the work being ascribed to 1961. Originally, a date of '1959' had been written, in a hand other than Fontana's, on the reverse. This was a period when Fontana created a number of his Buchi, or 'Holes'. However, during the course of the early 1960s, he had distilled the compositions increasingly, shifting from the more chaotic sprawls of his Buchi of the 1950s to the more formalised conceptions that we see in works such as Concetto spaziale and its contemporaries, for instance the picture of the same title listed as being on long-term loan to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (61 B 8). Now, single lines and curves, or perhaps ovals, dominated the canvases. Even the holes themselves were more uniform than in some of the earlier pictures grouped under the Buchi title: earlier pictures in the series sometimes featured rents that were clearly more vigorous and less controlled than the need openings in the surface of Concetto spaziale.
Fontana had begun his Buchi just over a decade earlier, in a work on paper made in 1949. This was, in some ways, one of his most influential discoveries. In an age when there was an increasing focus on the avoidance of illusion and on the two-dimensional picture plane, Fontana was revealing the sculptural nature of painting, its plastic qualities, while also opening up rifts of space within the very fabric of the work, as is demonstrated in Concetto spaziale.
That link to space is itself telling. Concetto spaziale features the holes forming a curved line across the surface that echoes constellations. Indeed, while the ancients looked at the stars in the night sky and identified them by picking out patterns and likenesses between the distant dots of light, so too Fontana encourages his viewers to read this image as though it were anchored in the realm of the figurative. Its curves hint at Nature and natural forms. Fontana has invoked the loose writing of the universe around us in this pattern. And that Spatial topic was all the more pertinent during 1961, the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space.
Intriguingly, it would appear to be partly on the basis of the rigorous simplicity of the composition, with its serpentine line of holes against the monochrome background that resulted in the work being ascribed to 1961. Originally, a date of '1959' had been written, in a hand other than Fontana's, on the reverse. This was a period when Fontana created a number of his Buchi, or 'Holes'. However, during the course of the early 1960s, he had distilled the compositions increasingly, shifting from the more chaotic sprawls of his Buchi of the 1950s to the more formalised conceptions that we see in works such as Concetto spaziale and its contemporaries, for instance the picture of the same title listed as being on long-term loan to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (61 B 8). Now, single lines and curves, or perhaps ovals, dominated the canvases. Even the holes themselves were more uniform than in some of the earlier pictures grouped under the Buchi title: earlier pictures in the series sometimes featured rents that were clearly more vigorous and less controlled than the need openings in the surface of Concetto spaziale.
Fontana had begun his Buchi just over a decade earlier, in a work on paper made in 1949. This was, in some ways, one of his most influential discoveries. In an age when there was an increasing focus on the avoidance of illusion and on the two-dimensional picture plane, Fontana was revealing the sculptural nature of painting, its plastic qualities, while also opening up rifts of space within the very fabric of the work, as is demonstrated in Concetto spaziale.