(Rosario di Santa Fe, Argentina 1899–1968 Comabbio)
Concetto spaziale, 1957, signed and dated, engobed and painted terracotta, holes and graffiti, brown and black, 32.5 cm diameter, in plexiglass box

This work is registered in the Archivio Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan

Provenance:
Galleria d’Arte Rinaldo Rotta, Genoa (certificate available, with wrong date)
Galleria Pater, Milan
Private Collection, Genoa
Galleria Studio Casoli, Milan
European Private Collection

Literature:
L. M. Barbero, Lucio Fontana. Catalogo ragionato delle sculture ceramiche, vol. II, Skira, Milan 2022, p. 480, no. 57 SPC 37 with ill.

Throughout the 20th century, several artists turned to black monochrome to express spiritual, existential, political or conceptual reflections. Kazimir Malevich was the forebear of this unprecedented aesthetic vision as early as 1915. This was the year in which he exhibited his famous Black Square in Petrograd, conceived as the perfect contemporary transposition of the sacred icon of Russian tradition. Created in the same years as Fontana's new research, Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings series lays an additional path through a radical act of formal purification, foreshadowing the new minimalist tendencies. In the present day we could refer to recently deceased Pierre Soulages who constantly investigated and excavated the expressive and dynamic potential of this apparent 'absence of light'.

Black is so prominent a colour in the history of the 20th century that the German philosopher Theodor Adorno went so far as to define it the only redeeming and expressive possibility for truly modern art in his posthumous essay "Ästhetische Theorie". Above all it would be highlighted as "one of the most profound impulses of abstraction content-wise" for the post-war artist. Fontana constantly sought and declined abstraction in his later years, from the late 1940s onwards, with unexpected and revolutionary results and formal proposals.

This auction offers two Spatial Concepts, characterised by hues which are apparently antithetical but both historically connected to spirituality and the mystery of the unknown. While the Concetto Spaziale of 1966 (lot. no. 206) echoes the sacredness of pre-Renaissance altarpieces, this other, totally black version offers a pure window onto the infinite and its irrational and inescapable enigma.This singular chromatic dichotomy has a further counterpoint in the story accompanying this last variant. The canvas, belonging to the ‘Barocchi’ series – which comprises rare variations of the Concetti Spaziali created in just three years between 1954 and 1957 - was originally conceived with the lower pentagon totally white and it remained so until the early 1960s, when Fontana infused the surface with its current totally opaque colour. The work, however, was already exhibited in its first colourway to the international public as early as 1957 at the Marborough Fine Arts Gallery in London, and was included in the catalogue raisonné containing his first iconography until 1986.

The fascinating quality of this Concetto Spaziale, apart from its origin and exhibition history, lies in the strong materiality that defines it. The surface of the central solids stands out and emerges from an abyssal background through the use of a magmatic, telluric pigment that thickens and thins out at different points. It recalls the contemporary experiments of artists such as Jean Fautrier and Alberto Burri linked to a purely material Informalist style.

“If it’s true that figuration won’t do anything good to us nor to others, then let’s get rid of this last surrogate of ‘form’! I have no intention to bow to this god. If I have to be alone, I won’t swap a warm image with a hostile presence; this internal dialogue with alien laws".
Leoncillo