(Rosario di Santa Fe, Argentina 1899–1968 Comabbio)
Concetto Spaziale “ATTESA”, 1964–65 signed and titled on the reverse, waterpaint on canvas, fluorescent pink, 46 x 38 cm, framed

This work is registered in the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan, under no. 4179/1 and is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity

Provenance:
Finarte Milan, 26 March 1991, lot 121
Private Collection, Milan
European Private Collection

Literature:
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana. Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti ambientazioni, Skira (ed.), Milan 2006, p. 744, no. 64–65 T 76 with ill. (with wrong illustration caption and note)

The Lucio Fontana Foundation has confirmed that this work will be catalogued as “pink” in the future edition of the catalogue raisonne, and that all layers of this work, including the final pink layer, are by the hand of the artist. The Foundation has issued a letter supporting this explanation.

Lucio Fontana: The immeasurability of space
Lucio Fontana pursues in his work the fundamental idea of renewing art by merging architecture, painting and sculpture. In his quest for a new spacial art form that overcomes the limitations of the two-dimensional canvas, Fontana proves to be one of the most experimental and innovative artists of the 20th century – and one that will form and inspire younger generations of artists. Fontana creates the first perforated canvases in 1949; about a decade later he takes to slashing them: brutal incisions applied to mostly monochrome canvases with a sharp knife.

Fontana’s brilliant move aims to unite real space with imagined space. His incisions are intuitive and precise like a surgical procedure, characterised by the swiftness and finesse with which they were applied. Prior to the incision, the surface was empty, unmarked space, the immaculacy of which is merely amplified by the audaciousness of the cut. He transforms the surface to a new spacial state by penetrating the very structure of the closed space. The penetration of the surface makes the fabric, the physical exterior of the canvas, sensuously cognisable, while the light dives into the crevice and disappears to open a new space underneath the surface, challenging the imagination of the viewer. The dual nature of the canvas is thus accentuated – it constitutes a physical carrier of something tangible, yet at the same time conveys the presence of something hidden. Characteristically, Fontana establishes the dialectics between physical materiality and immateriality by transcending in one swoop both the illusionism of traditional painting as well as the flat canvas as a hallmark of modernity.

Fontana created the works on offer back in 1964/65 (lot 211) and 1968 (lot 212). They distinctly represent the urgency and clarity of his later works. Initially, he mostly applied incisions orthogonally and in a rather rhythmic order to polygon-shaped canvases. In these later works, however, the technique has been reduced to one vertical slash through the central axis of a quadratic canvas. The luminous colour tones – the radiantly bright pink as well as the saturated green – draw a straight line to the lesser known but highly visionary environments he also created. He experimented with fluorescent tubes, neon and ultraviolet light to manipulate space and visual perception. A prime example of these experiments is Ambiente spaziale con neon, a work created by Fontana at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1967 and later also at Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, the European venues of his major travelling exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art New York. An S-shaped red neon tube passes through an exhibition room fully draped in red fabric. In Turin in 1961, for his Fonti di energia, soffitto di neon per ‘Italia 61’, Fontana installed a horizontal mesh of blue and green neon tubes across a high black-ceilinged exhibition room. The environments, as the slashed canvases, aspire to achieve a unity of perception, while also establishing, through interaction of colour, light, lines and objects, the sheer immeasurability of space.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
Leonardo Da Vinci