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CUTTING EDGE lucio fontana created daring new art forms that questioned and challenged convention. George Pendle looks at the remarkable legacy of this unique 20th-century maverick

In 1958, the nearly 60-year-old sculptor Lucio Fontana stepped towards a canvas, knife in hand, and slashed it down its middle. It seemed the simplest of gestures, casual even, but, in fact, it was quite opposite. Fontana had roamed the 20th century in search of a new artistic language.

He had created thousands of artworks using a vast array of materials, risking both critical ridicule and wilful obscurantism. He had pursued something that seemed forever just out of reach.

So, when Fontana strode forward and slashed that canvas, it wasn’t just a slash – it was the distillation of 60 years of unwavering inquisitiveness, stubborn probing and unmatched technical prowess. There was nothing casual

about it. The journey had begun 60 years before in the city of Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina, in 1899. The son of an Italian stonemason who specialised in monuments for the dead, the young Fontana was expected to enter the world of commercial sculpture too, but when his father took him to Italy at the age of seven, he soon became aware of a much wider world of art that was at that moment being shaken to its core.

Much of this shaking had been supplied

by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who, in 1909, had published the Manifesto of Futurism. This called for a violent rejection of the past and an embracing of the automobile, the aeroplane and the radio.

Monarchies were outdated, declared Marinetti,

religion was old hat, speed and technology were the new gods and militarism was the new sanctity.

The young Fontana was enamoured. It was his first love and sparked a lifelong infatuation with avant-garde movements. It was not just Futurism’s thrilling announcement of a new technological age that excited him, but the form it took. The strident manifestos, the philosophical declarations, the high theatre of being involved in an artistic movement would infuse his practice for the rest of his life.

When World War I erupted, the 17-year-old Fontana enlisted in the Italian army. He was badly wounded in the arm, but rather than cure him of his Futurist sympathies, it seemed merely to have confirmed them. ‘I experienced the battlefield in all

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cut and thrust One of Lucio Fontana’s signature slashed paintings, previous pages, ‘Spatial Concept, 1959 (artificial resin on canvas)’, and a photographic portrait of the artist by Lothar Wolleh. ‘Spatial Concept, 1949’ and ‘Spatial Concept (waterpaint on canvas)’, opposite from top. ‘New York 15, 1962 (aluminium)’, right, and, far right, Fontana at work in his studio in Milan in 1967

lwl-Westfaelisches Landesmuseum, Muenster, Germany/The Bridgeman Art Library; © oliver wolleh, berlin; christie’s images/corbis; the israel museum, jerusalem, israel/gift of barbara levinson, new york, to the american friends of the israel museum/the bridgeman art library; private collection/the bridgeman art library; contrasto/eyevine

its thunder,’ he would say in an interview later in life. ‘To that I owe my inclination toward art and toward exteriorisation in any form. Art was looking for new horizons. We believed the old models had been smashed to pieces on the battlefields.’

But where was he to find new ones?

In post-war Italy, a host of artistic movements clamoured for precedence. Futurists, Symbolists, Rationalists, Secessionists all vied to become the pre-eminent faction of the day, but it was the Novocento school, with its rejection of avant-garde modernism and revival of classical Italian virtues that was most warmly embraced by Benito Mussolini and the Fascist authorities.

As if reflecting the artistic flux of the age, Fontana’s sculptural style ranged wildly during these years. His first solo exhibition took place in 1931, only months after he graduated from the Milan Academy. The sculptures he produced were earthy, elemental reliefs, quite at odds with the

figurative clarity of the Novocento school.

‘Figure at the Window’ (1931) saw an indistinct body struggling to break free from its background.

Most radically, Fontana had painted parts of it – a choice that enraged the purist critics.

‘Fontana is one of those who squanders his intelligence in attitudes of opposition and polemic against antique art and against the academy,’ wrote one critic. ‘Coloured like sugar candies,’ sniffed another. As Anthony White suggests in Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, his sculptures had a ‘sensuous materiality that was considered improper to disinterested aesthetic experience.’ But, for Fontana, the use of colour was an attempt to break up the static quality of traditional sculpture. The artworks he showed in 1931 were not quite paintings and not quite solid sculptural objects. They floated somewhere in-between, seeming to transcend traditional notions of form. They were the first step on his journey towards a new artistic medium.

Fontana never refused the Fascist lira – few artists could afford to. But even in his overtly political commissions, he saw chances to experiment and further his own artistic quest. His 6m-tall allegorical figure ‘Victory’ (1936) appeared as the centrepiece of the Salone della Vittoria – a monumental interior that celebrated Italy’s recent brutal triumph in the Abyssinian War. It was an undoubtedly nationalistic piece, but it also allowed him to explore his growing interest in the ways art and architecture could be blended together to form an immersive experience for the viewer.

In 1940, Fontana returned to Argentina again and, when Italy entered the World War II, he decided to stay, founding an experimental art school in Buenos Aires. Freed from the warring movements of Europe, he finally had the chance to create his own group, rather than attempt to fit uncomfortably into someone else’s. The result, which he created in collaboration with his students, was the White Manifesto.

Published in 1946, it was, as Pia Gottschaller wrote in Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, ‘infused with a liberal dose of utopian expectation’.

It called on artists to produce work that is ‘a sum of physical elements – colour, sound, movement, time and space,’ as well as asking scientists to create new high-tech materials for them to use.

The White Manifesto may have been infuriatingly abstruse, but it was the first sign Fontana’s previous iconoclastic tendencies were coalescing into a theory.

On returning to Milan in 1947, Fontana announced the arrival of the new art movement of Spatialism. He declared it would ‘liberate art from matter.’ He now wrote manifesto after manifesto, and, while he was consistent in his calls to help

‘painting escape from the frame and sculpture from its bell jar’, the means of doing this often changed. Most of his ideas, however, were tinged with science and science fiction, as when he talked of an art that could be transmitted into the ether ‘using the conquests of television.

By means of a special keyboard, the colours of the rainbow will be introduced into the sky, so that we will have multi-coloured days.’

It was exuberant, crazy, funny. Like Marinetti and the Futurists before him, Fontana was seeking a radical rethinking of what art should be. And then, in 1949, he went one step further and the far-ranging ideas in his manifestos suddenly seemed to slip into the real world.

‘Spatial Environment in Black Light’ (1949) was a small dark room from the ceiling of which hung nine large, writhing, organic papier-mâché forms, painted in fluorescent paint. A black light provided the only illumination, causing the

Like marinetti and the Futurists before him, Fontana was seeking a radical rethinking of what art should be

strange shapes to glow ominously above viewers’ heads. Was the room meant to be a planetarium?

A spider’s web? A macabre carnival booth?

Each visitor had his or her own idea, but Fontana’s main aim was to create an entirely new artistic space in which one did not contemplate a detached form, but actually entered into the pictorial environment itself. Three-dimensional and site-specific, ‘Spatial Environment…’ was the forerunner of the ‘Installation Art’ that filled the latter half of the 20th century, from the work of Light and Space artists such as Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler to the hysterical Day-Glo installations of Yayoi Kusama.

The critics were both baffled and awed.

It was, said one, ‘the first graffito of the atomic age’. It was also an extension of the blending of art and architecture that Fontana had worked on before the war in his Fascist-themed piece ‘Victory’. However, rather than being temple-like

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‘Spatial Environment…’ was dark, eerie and altogether ambiguous.

‘Neon Structure for the 9th Triennial of Milan’ (1951) followed soon after. A gigantic light sculpture that hovered over a grand staircase at the triennial, it was made from over 100ft of white neon tubing that had been curled and looped into an arabesque. Elegant, seemingly immaterial, it was, declared Fontana, ‘neither painting nor sculpture, luminous shape in space – emotive freedom for the spectator.’ Some likened the swirling loop of the neon structure to the pouredpaint technique of Jackson Pollock, who, in 1950, had just been exhibited in Italy for the first time.

Despite these successes something was troubling Fontana. While ‘Spatial Environment…’ and ‘Neon Structure’ were radically new art forms, they still, inevitably, clung to the physical.

His manifestos had spoken of destroying the art object completely. Was this even possible? He began to worry that what he ultimately wanted from Spatialism was beyond the boundaries of rational thought itself. ‘I have the feeling of having thought something that goes beyond intelligence – something lunatic or crazy.’

Strangely enough, when he tried to resolve these doubts, the answer would not be found in cutting-edge science – as his manifestos had suggested – but through the use of a canvas, that

ancient technology that was the very epitome of the art he had been trying to leave behind.

In 1957, as space flight became a reality, Fontana began to poke small holes into unadorned sheets of paper, canvas and metal. He termed these works ‘Buchi’ – ‘holes’ – and spoke of how they opened up the space behind the picture.

‘I make a hole in a canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art, and I escape – symbolically, but also materially – from the prison of the flat surface. I have not attempted to decorate a surface, I have tried to break its dimensional limitations.’

When these works were lit from behind, they came alive with shadows caused by the ridges of the punctured paper. The effect was not dissimilar to that of craters on the moon.

Whereas the Abstract Expressionists were seeking artistic purity by embracing the ‘flatness’ of the picture plane, Fontana was manipulating and violating the pictorial surface in search of new spaces beyond the flat. To him, Jackson Pollock was nothing but a ‘post-Impressionist’ who had tried but failed to go beyond the canvas.

And then, in 1958, Fontana picked up a Stanley knife, placed the tip of its blade on the canvas, and moved his hand downward in one quick movement. And thus were born his famous ‘Tagli’, or ‘cuts’, works. It was a complete subversion of the painting method. The canvas, which had, for centuries, been a provider of illusory space for artists, now held within it actual space. Indeed, by replacing a brush with a knife, Fontana had robbed the act of painting of its very content.

From being a mode of creation, the brushstroke had become the bearer of absence.

His painterly gesture had not created line or shape, but an elongated, tapering, lightly curving hole – an opening that suggested something beyond the canvas. Here was the answer to all his manifestos, all his wishes of creating a unique art that went beyond matter. With the slash, he had transformed the two-dimensional canvas into a gateway to infinite space.

A month before his death in 1969, the artist gave his last interview. Asked to opine on the future of art, he replied, ‘Art is going to be a completely different thing… not an object, not a form… Art is going to become infinite, immensity, immaterial, philosophy.’ Fontana had already taken it halfway there.

archivio cameraphoto epoche/getty images; de agostini/getty images; © LUCIO FONTANA/SIAE/DACS LONDON 2013

space exploration ‘Spatial Light, 1951’, left, and, below, Fontana in front of one of his trademark ‘Tagli’ canvases at the Biennale, 1966