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Date Submitted: 05/30/2013 08:52 AM
Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1968
Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) was an Italian sculptor, painter, and theorist. He was one of the first artists to promote the idea of art as gesture or performance. In particular, his works with holes and slashes show the triumph of conceptual in art. The space opening up behind the holes explores the issue of two and three dimensionality and treats a painting as an object, not just a traditional two dimensional easel painting. Trained as a sculptor, his paintings have a keenly material quality. Fontana wrote in 1948, 'Art dies but is saved by gesture.' Destruction and creation were bound together in his works. The same gesture that disproved the canvas as a purely pictorial vehicle also opened up its sculptural possibilities.
Concetto Spaziale ('Spatial Concept') (1968) is one of a series of works that Lucio Fontana made in Milan between 1958 and 1968. The series from this period is known to be the artist’s signature style. These works, which consist of a canvas that has been cut either once or multiply, are collectively known as the Tagli('cuts'). The "cut" explores limitation of the painted flat surface. The monochrome background and the incisions emphasize the relationship between space, time, and light. When considering only the background of the painting, it is a monochrome acrylic painting. The surface of the painting is smooth, and it reminds of color field paintings that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. The large field of flat, solid color spreads across the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. For the background alone, it places less emphasis on gesture and brushstrokes, hence there is no sign of painterly quality, meaning that the flat background is dissimilar to the works by impressionists like Monet and Degas whose painted surfaces are thick. Color becomes the subject in itself. However, there are five violent cuts across in the center that cannot be missed. The fierce strokes of...