Serge de Bloe, Brussels
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening, 5 February 2004, Lot 6
Acquired directly from the ab🌳ove by the pr﷽esent owner

Executed in 1964, the year after his first major retrospective was organised by Enrico Crispolti, Concetto Spaziale, Attese is an exceptionally rare and majestic example from Lucio ꦛFontana’s eponymous series. Adopting the widest format canvas of all the slash paintings, the present work comprises an elegant and lyrical progression of fifteen assured incisions across the pristine, virginal white canvas. What makes this work so exceptional, however, are the four horizontal lines, analogous to Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, which dissect tꩵhe subtly differentiated vertical axes of the cuts, creating a surprisingly complex, asymmetrical harmony.

A new departure for this artist who continually probed the confines of the flat picture plane, the horizontal striations in the present work are peerless within his later oeuvre, with the exception of three much smaller canvases from the same date. Interestingly, the horizontal bands of colour and multiple slashes look back to some of his earliest experiments with the Stanley-knife. Although Fontana had coined the ‘buco’ (hole) in the canvas as his new language in art as early as 1948, it was not until 1958 that he first made his ‘tagli’ (slashes) in the canvas. One of his earliest forays into this realm, now in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (59 T 61), also shows the artist experimenting with diverging horizontal lines, a compositional device which finds its apogee in the present work. Whereas in the earlier canvas the cuts are rough-hewn and crude, by the date of the present work Fontana had significantly refined his technique, arriving at the means to perfect the cut. Starting with a canvas of the optimum weight and weave, Fontana first drenched the canvas in shop-bought emulsion (idropittura); leaving the paint until it was almost dry, he would use a Stanley-knife to enact the cut with surgical precision, first making a small incision and then continuing the downward movement with steady and consistent pressure until the taglio reached its conclusion. Finally, when the paint was fully dry, Fontana would gently ease open the slashes to give each its unique, sculptural quality, lining the back with fine black gauze to create the impression of infinite space. By 1964, the year of the present work, Fontana had honed the gesture to give 💟it the bell-like clarity that makes this masterpiece such a resounding success.

The genealogy of the taglio, a signature gesture synonymous with the artist himself, is a complex one, with both formal and philosophical roots. In the first instance, the punctured canvas was not just a gash but a vehicle for making the viewer look beyond the physical fact of the painting, to what Fontana called ‘free space’. In a formal sense, this offered an escape from the prison of the flat ca𝓰nvas. Fontana felt that scientific advances – Yuri Gagarin’s momentous first manned flight into space took place in 1961 – demanded a parallel innovation in art, which, he declared, should reach out to its surroundings, existing not in two dimensions but in space. Sculpture, being three-dimensional, did this necessarily, as did the kind of environmental installation that Fontana explored early on (the form which has since become a genre in itself). By penetrating the picture plane, by desanctifying the flatness of theꦜ canvas which had become the hallmark of high modernism, Fontana opened painting to a new realm of possibilities.

This is as much a conceptual leap as it is a visual one, with the space created by the slash standing for the idea of a space without physical boundaries. Fontana was fascinated by space and energy as invisible elements essential to both life and art. For him the taglio was the distillation of pure space and pure energy in a single gesture. Yves Klein, greatly influenced by Fontana, was concomitantly exploring his own idiosyncratic solutions to the same formal and conceptual conundrums, developing his blue monochromes to enshrine in art what he dubbed the void (Fontana was one of the first to acquire such a monochrome) and conducting his Anthropometries in order to condense movement and energy in🔯to the picture💟 plane.

The gen🐓esis of the horizontal lines is less certain, however the influence of Piet Mondrian and the American Post-painterly abstractionists is paramount. Fontana had visited New York for the first time in 1961 to attend the opening of his first solo exhibition that side of the Atlantic at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Overwhelmed by the city and its skyline, he set about an extraordinary series of works using copper and aluminium sheets which he slashed, pierced and scratched. He was no less overwhelmed by the art he encountered there, and the horizontal bands in the present work testify to his intelligent assimilation of parallel developments made in American art. Mondrian, who had moved to New York in 1940 to avoid the war – Fontana spent his war years in Argentina – had developed an aesthetic of neo-plasticism, restricting the painter’s means to the most basic kinds of horizontal and vertical line and a palette of primary colours, creating compositions whose pulsing rhythm jumped from intersection to intersection like the grid of New York streets which inspired him. Barnett Newman continued the lineage, concentrating on shape and colour to create with his ‘zips’ canvases charged with spiritual and symbolic meaning. Unlike Fontana and his🌊 Abstract Expressionist peers, Newman eliminated signs of the action painter’s hand, preferring to work with broad, even expanses of deep colour.

In the present work, Fontana’s own art practice which had developed separately but in parallel, reveals itself to be a combination of both: while on the one hand the near monochrome canvas with its continuous bands of colour adhere to the impersonality of touch and ineluctable flatness synonymous with post-painterly abstraction, the single gesture of the slash, with all its ontological ramifications, is evocative of the dynamic Abstract Expressionist gestures which Pollock physically inscribed – and Fontana literally inscribed – in the picture plane. In stark contrast to the Venezia series of 1961 with their Baroque, swirling arabesques and filigree lines traced with fingers through the paint, here we glimpse New York in the more structured, regimented lyricism at play in this rarefie꧂d, one-off composition.