Lucio Fontana
Concetto Spaziale, Attesa
Date 1960
Medium Natural canvas
Dimensions 68.5 x 69 cm
Inventory ID UID 102-202
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Lucio Fontana's first incisions in natural canvas with a knife date from 1958. Over the course of ten years he made around one thousand (990) such actions in canvases of all sizes. Aside from a few rare exceptions, the canvases are natural and not painted. The lacerations are frequently vertical and only rarely oblique. At the start, Fontana made multiple small thrusts with the knife, as if he were continuing the ‘buchi' series but using longer perforations. The incisions are short but very numerous. As the months passed the number of incisions fell but their length increased, sometimes spanning the full height of the canvas. The presence of a single long incision represented one of his purest and most minimalist gestures. Everything is then focused on the opening of two lips, on the play of light and shade, on the void and its mystery, and on the creation of a space and a depth, as if a traditional perception of beauty were hiding behind the sacrilegious act of laceration. It is this ambiguity, a constant feature of Fontana's work, that makes it so original, particularly in this work dedicated to a certain Teresita. AC