Lucio Fontana: the origins of spatialism (and an exhibition in Lucca to understand them)

In 1946, Lucio Fontana (Rosario, Argentina, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968) is a forty-seven-year-old man, well aware that the world in which he is living has undergone profound changes. World War II has just ended: he has preferred to avoid it, settling for the duration of the conflict in Argentina. But when the war is over, he returns and realizes that the world is no longer the same as he had known it before. And not only because the war had caused horrific losses that no one could perhaps have imagined up to that point, but also because it had upset balances and opened up new perspectives. There is thus a desire to start again, wiping the slate clean of what had gone before to try to build a new world. A dynamic world, constantly moving, characterized by rapidity. In parallel, science makes further progress: the discovery of the neutron dates back to 1932, the first missiles that can reach space are designed in the 1940s, and in the same period Enrico Fermi and his team of researchers build the first nuclear reactor. Obviously art, which cannot escape history, must necessarily confront this reality.

And Lucio Fontana is fully aware of this. It is necessary to take note that society, after recent events, has changed, and that life is being organized differently. Also by virtue of what science has managed to conquer. “The boundless discoveries of science gravitate to this new organization of life. The discovery of new physical forces, dominion over matter and space gradually impose conditions on man that have never existed in the whole course of history. The application of these discoveries in all forms of life produces a change in man’s nature. Man takes on a different psychic structure. We live in the age of mechanics. Painted cardboard and upright plaster no longer have a reason for being.” This is what the artist wrote in the White Manifesto, the declaration of intent published in 1946, conventionally sanctioning the birth of Spatialism, the movement intended to propose art forms that had never existed before. A new world needs, in short, anew art: for Fontana it is no longer possible to meet the challenges of the contemporary world with the forms of expression used up to that time. The artist thus sanctions the overcoming of “painted cardboard” and “upright plaster”: painting and sculpture belong to the past, Lucio Fontana’s art goes beyond it.

The first novelty consists in the fact that Lucio Fontana aims to leave behind art that must rely on matter to convey its message, and to become eternal. But for him, although art can be eternal, it cannot at the same time be immortal: the spirit of the artist remains, his idea is destined to last forever, but the danger of material destruction looms. For this reason, the new art must be “disengaged from matter,” as the artist wrote, in 1947, in the First Manifesto of Spatialism, signed together with three other artists: Beniamino Joppolo, Giorgio Kaisserlian and Milena Milani. Art must therefore be founded on gesture: for it is gesture that is eternal. And what Fontana aspires to is a gesture that can provide a synthesis of the “physical elements” of reality, identified, in the Technical Manifesto of Spatialism, in “color, sound, movement, space,” with the aim of achieving “an ideal and material unity.”

This “unity” that sums up color, sound, movement and space will be achieved with the celebrated Spatial Concepts, conceived starting in 1949. Some of these works are on display these days in Lucca, at the Lu.C.C.A. - Lucca Center of Contemporary Art, in the exhibition La tela violata. Fontana, Castellani, Bonalumi, Burri, Scheggi, Simeti, Amadio and the Physical Investigation of the Third Dimension (March 19, 2016 - June 19, 2016), which aims to trace the fruitful season of Spatialism up to its most recent developments. For the research inaugurated by Lucio Fontana continues to this day. But they start from afar, from the 1940s, when Lucio Fontana begins to propose his holes on paper: the material is torn according to ever-new patterns, often within forms outlined by pencil tracings that almost always take on oval shapes, symbols of rebirth and probable allusions to the cosmos that man, in those years, was beginning to conquer and whose possibilities were also to be probed by art. We are beyond painting and sculpture: Lucio Fontana’s works can no longer be called “paintings” or “sculptures,” because they are a sum of all forms of expression.

Works by Lucio Fontana at the exhibition The Violated Canvas. From left to right: Concetto spaziale (1955-1960; holes, tears and scratches on white cardboard, 50 x 67 cm; Private collection), Concetto spaziale - Attese (1966; watercolor on canvas, 81 x 65.5 cm; Macerata, Fondazione Carima-Museo Palazzo Ricci), Concetto spaziale (1963-1965; tears and scratches on blotting paper, 50 x 60 cm; Milani Collection)

In 1969, critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco wrote that Lucio Fontana’s holes are a “metaphor for space, light, and creation.” And this metaphor would later find further development in the famous cuts: the artist rips open the canvas with cuts that open up a new dimension of the artwork. One of the main problems in the history of art had been to provide a representation of the third dimension on the two-dimensional support: Lucio Fontana, with the gesture of cutting, cancels the limits of the physical support and succeeds, like his contemporary cosmonauts, in conquering a new space never before probed in the entire history of art. The great Gillo Dorfles wrote, in the 1960s, that Fontana’s spatialism had succeeded in its intent “to unhinge the monotony of illusory two-dimensionality or of the even more illusory and illusionistic three-dimensionality feigned by chiaroscuro drawing and color”: Fontana, in short, succeeds in creating a truly three-dimensional work. But not only that: as mentioned, the cut (and, before the latter, the hole) opens up above a new space. And the fact that the conquest of the new space acquires a fundamental importance is also underscored by the evolution of Fontana’s artistic research: in the Cuts the forms that characterized the first Spatial Concepts disappear, and the artist proceeds by elimination rather than by addition, because after all what matters is the artist’s gesture. This is why Fontana’s cuts often take on the name Waiting: it is the waiting for “a new solution,” in Fontana’s own words, it is the waiting for the artist’s gesture that once the cut is made suggests new spatial possibilities to the viewer, and it is probably also the waiting for theinfinity that lies beyond the cut.

Indeed, the cut allows us to look beyond the perceived space: it is as if Lucio Fontana provides us with a gateway to go beyond reality. His work thus unites physical space with imagined space, earth space with cosmic space, the finite with the infinite. The canvas alone is not enough to represent the infinite: the artist’s gesture is responsible for suggesting this new dimension. “The discovery of the cosmos is a new dimension, it is infinity: then I pierce this canvas, which was the basis of all the arts, and I created an infinite dimension, an X that for me is the basis of all contemporary art”: this is what the artist says about his works.

Lucio Fontana, as mentioned, was credited with inaugurating the researches of Spatialism. A large group of artists continued the path he began to probe new spatial possibilities, new ways of suggesting infinity, new ways of overcoming the rigid two-dimensionality of the canvas. The exhibition in Lucca investigates all these experiences through a coherent path, presenting in chronological succession a number of masterpieces from private collections, as well as from public collections, by all the main Spatialist artists. Not only of Lucio Fontana, of course: but of the other artists we will tell you again soon.... !

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