Spatial Concept

Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina, where he was influenced by the classic sculptures and architecture of his father, and spent many years living in Italy. The experimental matrix in his artworks began to unfold as a result of his life in both countries. Yet, it was in the European peninsula where he developed the spatial period of his production. In 1925, on one of his first sojourns in Europe, Fontana settled in Paris and, in the heat of the discussions that took place in that city, he began to lose the academic bias that was present in his first productions. His sculptures made in the nineteen-thirties prioritized expressionist features of figures, and a practice on the matter that gradually revealed an abstract nature. In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, Fontana went back to Argentina and lived in Rosario, where he created sculptures that ranged from a figuration of academic imprint to a more expressionist line, at times with a marked baroque style. Back in Italy in 1947, Fontana subscribed his Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo [First Manifesto of Spatialism], and signed other manifestos in Milan, which finally shaped his ideas of “spatial concept” that meant breaking away from the limits of tradition and embraced the opening of art toward new dimensions. His spatial oil paintings embodied this concept through the well-known “holes” and “cuts” made of punctures or scratches on the canvas. The "Concetto spaziale" [Spatial Concept] from 1962 belongs to a series of works in which the ripping goes beyond the mere cut caused by the rapid movement that tears the canvas up, and takes on a less purist character. The torn canvas features two rows of irregular holes that introduce the space-time dimension in the piece. Moreover, this painting of thick-oiled texture covers the edges of the gaps, overlapping the uniform and sensual surface of the pink background, and the pierced areas, like explosions, contrast with the delicate line of the circles around them.