Concetto spaziale, Teatrino

‘My figurative forms ... were devised by a basically philosophical mentality’
–Lucio Fontana


Held in the same private collection for over fifty years, Concetto spaziale, Teatrino is a striking example of the Teatrini (‘Little theatres’) that captivated Lucio Fontana between 1964 and 1966. Furthering his explorations of dimensionality in art, a shaped, lacquered off-white wooden frame becomes an integral part of the work. Surrounding a bitonal canvas that is punctured with a diagonal constellation of Fontana’s signature buchi (‘holes’), an organic, tree-like form extends from the frame’s lower edge. Exceptionally, the canvas’s upper half is painted off-white, while the lower half is unpainted: Fontana particularly prized raw canvas, seeing its virgin state as underlining the primal nature of his slashing and piercing the picture plane. Forming a series of over 170 works, the Teatrini allowed Fontana to explore his Spatialist theories in a new manner that he defined as ‘realistic Spatialism’. Resembling carefully orchestrated theatre stages, as their title suggests, the tangible depth of these constructions is emphasized through Fontana’s use of staggered planes. In the present work, the rare use of dividing horizontal bands of off-white and raw natural canvas accentuates the sense of a horizon; the trajectory of the buchi even seems to imply a soaring, skyward motion from ground to space. Created whilst Fontana was still working on his buchi, tagli and olii and finishing his acclaimed cycle of Fine di Dio, the Teatrini offer an insight into Fontana’s ongoing interest in the playful and the figurative. They are also connected to his other performative investigations into real space, such as the Ambienti, walk-in site-specific installations in which he manipulated effects of light and perspective to create an all-encompassing spatial experience. The Teatrini can also be perceived as permanent representations of the temporary environmental interventions that the artist had explored earlier that same decade. In this context, it was only natural that the Teatrini would in turn give rise to actual set designs for a ballet at La Scala, Milan, which Fontana completed in in 1966.

The slick, amorphous forms of Fontana’s theatrical ‘frames’ also represent a dialogue between his practice and the developments of American Pop art in the 1960s. Ever eager to push the boundaries of his art, Fontana sought to reflect the idealised, industrial aesthetic of Pop, and enlisted the assistance of master woodworkers to fashion the lacquered Teatrini frames based on his drawings. He saw the exquisite finish of these casings as a means of enticing viewers to meditate on his deeply conceptual practice. ‘My figurative forms … were devised by a basically philosophical mentality’, Fontana explained. ‘I am not a materialist, in all of my works nothing really remains of the materialist form. If I use lacquered wood, then of course it is it is exclusively in order to make a record: I render it more beautiful with the help of a technique, but in fact it is pure documentation. I could use raw wood and the effect would be understood all the same … In this way, however, someone might be attracted by the beauty of the material, by the form (L. Fontana, quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 118). Indeed, in the present work, while we are drawn in by the work’s tactile and appealing frame, we are ultimately invited to gaze beyond the limitations of foreground, picture plane and horizon into deep space. The earthbound shape in the foreground introduces a sense of the vastness of Fontana’s momentous breach of the canvas – the buchi, which embody the first breakthrough in his Spatialist ideas – soaring like a rocket to infinity, with terrestrial existence dwarfed far below.