Concetto Spaziale

The cuts and holes sliced into monochrome canvases by the Argentine-Italian avant-garde artist are among the most iconic and iconoclastic artistic treatments in modern art history. They are radical gestures that can be construed as the ritual ‘incineration’ of the centuries-old dictum that a painter’s canvas is a flat surface on which space can be suggested by applying paint. In…

The cuts and holes sliced into monochrome canvases by the Argentine-Italian avant-garde artist are among the most iconic and iconoclastic artistic treatments in modern art history. They are radical gestures that can be construed as the ritual ‘incineration’ of the centuries-old dictum that a painter’s canvas is a flat surface on which space can be suggested by applying paint. In this Concetto spaziale (Spatial concept) on a canvas painted dark brown there are four tagli running from top to bottom. They are not vertical but slightly curved, following the speed and natural arc of the cutting arm. It was an action that required the artist’s total concentration, slicing through the canvas with a box cutter. The rhythmic and aestheticising aspects lie in the position and width of the tagli. The parallelism of the three shorter cuts – two narrow ones and a third broader one – is highlighted by the longest and widest cut, which curves slightly away from the trio. ‘When I work as a painter on one of my prepared canvases I do not want to make a painting, I want to open up space, create a new dimension for the art, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture’. In other words, by slashing through the two-dimensional space of canvas, the artist activated the viewer’s three-dimensional space. Through the worm-like openings (the tagli or buchi) he opened up the view of an indeterminate black space behind the canvas. The space is suggested by black gauze that absorbs the light falling in from the outside space, as a result of which the light falls mainly on the bulging or slightly frayed borders of the cuts in the canvas. Suddenly the canvas becomes a three-dimensional object, a body. The artist regarded this optical and instinctive play with spatiality as an evocation of infinity. Fontana was the spiritual father of spatialism, an Italian movement that investigated the spatial qualities of both sculpture and painting. Fontana’s Concetti spaziali appeal to the imagination, which has led to a multiplicity of associations. Some people believe that his work is an allusion to the historical space race during the Cold War between the United States and the former USSR. Others link the tagli to the sexual act. Yet more regards Fontana as a doubting Thomas who roots around with his fingers in Christ’s body, and lightly presses on the flaps of skin, preventing the wound from closing. From the art-historical point of view Fontana is above all an important representative of the second postwar period in abstract art (the years 1950 and 1960). His works thus tie in with the monochrome blue works by Yves Klein, with their invitation to leap into the void, or with the colourfield paintings by Barnett Newman. With his trailblazing Manifesto bianco in the late 1940s he laid the groundwork for Piero Manzoni, the Italian arte povera and the international ZERO movement of Otto Piene and Heinz Macke. In Belgium there was the G58 movement of abstract artists. Key figures there included Walter Leblanc and Jef Verheyen, who for a time were also ZERO artists and shared monochrome painting with Fontana. G58 exhibited for the first time in the Hessenhuis in Antwerp, which is where Fontana bought a work by Verheyen. In 1962 they both worked together, and during a recording for the TV programme Medium Fontana perforated one of Verheyen’s canvases with a theatrical flourish. Fontana, in other words, was also a performance artist.