Lucio Fontana’s Tagli

Recalling a visit to his friend’s studio, Italian photographer Ugo Mulas recounts Fontana’s description of his fastidious process: ‘That is to say, I don’t come into the studio, take off my jacket, and—snap!—make three or four cuts. No, sometimes I leave the canvas hanging there for weeks before being sure what I’m going to do with it, and only when I feel sure do I start.’[2] Reflecting on Fontana’s ‘spatial concept’—his aim to explore and create space beyond the canvas—and the artist’s unique process, Mulas suggests, ‘Perhaps it was precisely because of this concentration and conceptual expectation that Fontana called his pictures with cuts ‘Attese (the wait).’’[3]

One of the most notable and fascinating features of ‘Concetto spaziale, Attese’ is usually hidden from view. Having signed and titled his work on the back of the canvas, Fontana added the following ‘Sono tornato ieri da Venezia, ho visto il film di Antonioni!!!’ (‘I returned from Venice yesterday, I saw Antonioni’s film!!!’).

Fontana’s excitement is still palpable, and his remarkable painting’s impressive scale—recalling the extreme horizontality of cinematic screens—gains further meaning in context of the inscription, as does the artist’s choice of red. Fontana had just seen Michelangelo ‘Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)’, which was awarded the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion a few months earlier in the autumn of 1964.

One of the director’s most esteemed works, ‘Il deserto rosso’ was not only Antonioni’s first color film, it was his experimentation with and foregrounding of color throughout the film that particularly dazzled his contemporaries. In his 1965 review for The Sunday Times, Dilys Powell dramatically suggested: ‘Watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, I felt I had never before seen color in a film.’

[4] In the film, Antonioni repeatedly contrasts artificially saturated primary colors with the dominant gray of the film’s industrial setting—expressing a crucial aspect of his haunting exploration of postwar industrialization and alienation. Antonioni’s interests in scientific, technological, and cinematic advancements were not only shared by Fontana, but by a number of exceptional Italian artists inspired by similar themes, as well as the potential of the monochrome, during the 1960s.

Fabio Mauri famously explored the impact of the screen—both the television and movie screen—on modern consumer society in his monochromatic Schermi (screens). Concurrently, Piero Manzoni’s series of white Achromes also responded to the new cultural, economic, and industrial circumstances of postwar Italy. Fontana had already outlined his vision for an artistic language that would reflect these new realities in 1946, when he wrote his Manifesto Blanco: ‘It is necessary to transcend painting, sculpture, poetry, and music.

We require a greater art, which will be consistent with the demands of the new spirit... We demand an art which is free of all aesthetic artifice.’[5] ‘Concetto spaziale, Attese’ is Fontana’s breathtaking response to his own challenge. It directly reflects, more than many of his works, the artist’s myriad influences, including Antonioni’s dynamic modernism, and showcases Fontana’s radical transformation of painting, which would change the course of art history. Both seductively elegant and evocatively sublime, ‘Concetto spaziale, Attese’ is a rare icon of 20th-century art. – ‘Concetto spaziale, Attese’ is featured in Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel, from 13 – 16 June 2019.