Soffitto spaziale

Lucio Fontana devoted an important part of his creative energy to collaborating with architects. This appeared already in the interwar years and continued with renewed monumentum after 1947. He did not limit himself, however, to the traditional inclusion of independent reliefs and sculptures, some of them monumental, in the architectural space, but whenever the partnership with an architect, the occasion and the vision of the clinets made this possible, the sculptor sought to produce organically integrated decorative works. By integrating his sculptural forms, symbols and polychromy with the structures and even with the artificial and natural light sources, he transformed living quarters and functional spaces into true unified environmental settings. In many cases they are among the most advanced and coherent achievements of his formal experiments in the post-war period. These projects were often collaborations with the architect Osvaldo Borsani, whom he had know since he studied at Brera in the lat twenties. Fontana often worked with him from 1949 on (when he made a large spatial cieling with reflected light fot the Gentili house in Milan) and throughout the following decade down to 1960 on the construction of numerous noteworthly interior designs. The sculptor fashioned this ceiling for the dining room of the Hotel del Golfo at Procchio (Isola d'Elba), designed by Borsani in 1956 to a commission from the owner, Mario Camerini. Fully respecting the room's function, Fontana designed and produced in situ (using long rods and with the help only of some local builders) an extremely precise and very modern project. The grey surface of the plaster laid on the ceiling is systematically animated by the signs scored in it, with sequences of larger holes, which house the spotlights of the lighting system, and above all by a very early series of incisions, not scored freely but forcefully incised and articulated in coherent nuclei which line the surface of the work, the first and most precise anticipation of the cuts in the "Attese", which Fontana first made on paper and canvas only from the middle of 1958. Without prejudice to the lightness of his handling, the severity of the whole reveals the artist's desire to move completely beyond the sinuous elegance and material overabundance of certain of the "Barocchi". This is despite his widespread use of small applications of plaster in relief and the ttactile prominence of the scrolling of the fresh rendering along the edges of the slits, highlighted by the side lights playing over the rough surfaces. Even the colour accents - red, green, blue, yellow, brown and white - are laid on dry, merely to sustain the rhythm of the graphic composition, without adding a pictorial emphasis to the abstract-expressionist taste. This modernist spatial inflection of a timeless material, simple and natural as plaster, confirms the way Fontana's work includes both experimental projections and the retrieval of earlier expressions. As was pointed out by Rosanna Giovannetti Amidei in presenting this work for the first time in 1972, it seems almost offered as "verification of the validity of his thesis about the artificial-natural relationship." In 2002 it was no longer possible to ensure the work's preservation in the original location. Through the good offices of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, the Ministero per i Beni Culturali acquired Fontana's ceiling from the owners . Between October and December 2003 it was removed in twnty-five panels by the restorers Barbara Ferriani and Cristina Vazio. In was subjected to restoration, unique of its kind, which took places by stages, lasting until the end of 2007. The ceiling was reassembled in the spaces of the new Museo del Novecento in June 2010. [Giorgio Zanchetti]