“For me, they are perforated canvases that represent sculpture, a new fact in sculpture.”

LUCIO FONTANA, 2006

At once disquieting and dreamy, Lucio Fontana’s body of work is inundated by the tensions which drive the elements of the work beyond the forms they occupy. The overwhelming sense of coexisting creative and destructive components clearly relates to the amalgamation of pleasure and pain, the true mark of the sublime. Fontana’s appreciation for the scientific advances of the twentieth century enabled his artistic development in this marriage of technology and art to produce a fourth dimension. In his paintings, Fontana sought foremost to eclipse the environs of the two-dimensional surface and encroach upon the psychology of its viewers.

The present lot, Concetto spaziale, translating literally to “Spatial concept,” employs both planar shapes and biomorphic silhouettes amidst undulating curves. The starkly monochromatic work is interrupted by the iridescent green oil paint blossoming off the canvas in thick sweeps with minute incisions providing a textural element to its emergence. The fissure occupying the foreground is not so much a laceration as it is a sculptural construction, a way of desanctifying the two-dimensionality of the surface. Fontana acknowledges as a way of exposing the intangible sublime, as he once proclaimed, “I have created an infinite dimension” (C. Lonzi, “Interview with Lucio Fontana,” Autoritratto, Bari, Italy 1969, p. 169). The picture itself is a constitutional fusion and rhythmic dance of sculpture, architecture, and painting--an authentic apex of the artist’s innovative aesthetic dialect.

Fontana’s revolutionary concept of Spazialismo was the culmination of the fundamental precepts illustrated in his art. The artist’s dynamic ability to mutate solid matter into energy is unparalleled, and it comprises the essence of his theory. He formulated the comprehensive title Concetto spaziale in 1947 and used it for nearly all of his later art, the most effective of these being works incisions rupturing a surface that preserves the elegantly erratic character of malleable organic materials such as wax or oil paint, such as in the present lot. Concetto spaziale utilizes contrasts as a point of departure to engage audiences in the struggle between the material and the spatial, invoking the concept of painting as more than a simple surface.