Over 40 Years since His Death, a Look at Lucio Fontana’s Prolific … · 2016-02-09 · Lucio...

Transcript of Over 40 Years since His Death, a Look at Lucio Fontana’s Prolific … · 2016-02-09 · Lucio...

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Over 40 Years since His Death, a Look at LucioFontana’s Prolific Destruction

ARTSY

FEB 9TH, 2016 1:45 PM

Lucio Fontana, the celebrated Italian painter widely considered to be thefounder of Spatialism, spent the majority of his career honing in on theradical potential of a single kind of mark-making: the slash. “Mydiscovery was the hole and that’s it,” he told an interviewer in 1968, theyear of his death. “I am happy to go to the grave after such a discovery.”

From the moment Fontana began to dot his canvases with tiny puncturesin the ’40s, that single gesture remained the focal point for his famedpaintings, which combined elements of sculpture and drawing, fine artand Futuristic concerns, to create a unique language at the intersection ofmultiple disciplines. At times compared to wounds, the carefully placedslashes and nuanced gestures of destruction relay a sense of purephysicality. Fontana’s most recognizable works relay an alchemic use oflight and shadow, wherein the flatness of a canvas is exploited andreconfigured as a graceful sculptural object. “I make a hole in the canvasin order to leave behind me the old pictorial formula,” he once said. “Thepainting and the traditional view of art I escape symbolically, but alsomaterially, from the prison of the flat surface.”

At Robilant + Voena’s current exhibition of the artist’s work in St.Moritz, a curated selection focuses on his later works, which includelesser-known metal sculptures and ceramic objects. Working throughmuch of his career on recursive, generative series—essentially, variationson a profoundly stripped-down set of themes—Fontana posthumouslyprovides a glimpse into his working process over a period of decades.Instances of his Concetti spaziali (spatial concepts) series, under whichmany of his various cycles (for instance, the buchi cycle, named for thesmall pinpricks and holes it contains) from 1951 and 1957 are ondisplay, as are more obscure object lessons in the artist’s analyticalpractice. In one of the Concetto Spaziale pieces from 1965, Fontanaperforated a metal sheet and dotted the piece with ethereal blue Muranoglass globes.

—M. Osberg

“Lucio Fontana” is on view at Robilant + Voena, St Moritz, Dec. 4th, 2015– Feb. 29th, 2016.

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