Lucio Fontana

An Italian painter and sculptor, author of theoretical works on art. Lucio Fontana is considered the most radical artist after Kazimir Malevich, who managed to bring art to a new round of the development of abstraction and minimalism. The name of Fontana is associated primarily with his cut paintings: the artist unsparingly cut them with a sharp blade or pierced his canvas with a knife. But he did not intend to destroy his works. He just wanted to expand the pictorial space of his painting, to make them voluminous and evoking different associations.

Since Fontana’s father was a sculptor, Lucio made his first steps in this kind of art. His sculptures had abstract shapes that were new for Italian art; that is why the artist’s work was immediately noticed and considered innovative and progressive. Lucio Fontana joined the famous Parisian association “Abstraction-Creation” and, together with his associates, organized his office in Milan. The sculptor’s exhibition in 1930 was the first exhibition of abstract, non-figurative sculpture in Italy.

Like its predecessors, Italian Futurists, Fontana set forth his views in artistic manifestos. In one of his treatises called the “White Manifesto,” he called for the use of scientific achievements in the art that would fundamentally change it. The artist also invented a new art movement – Spatialism (from Italian “Spazio” – space). The essence of this artistic method was to combine sculpture and painting and overcome the usual two-dimensionality in pictures.

The influence of Lucio Fontana on the development of Italian avant-garde painting is fundamental. His creative heritage is of great importance on a global scale since before him no artist could expand the boundaries of the painting so much, turning it into infinite space and the whole Universe.

Key ideas:

– Fontana became famous thanks to his work with holes and cuts on canvases. The artist created the first such painting in 1949, making a long vertical cut on the neutral surface of the painting, and turning it in this way from two-dimensional to three-dimensional work. Through the holes, the viewer could see what was previously hidden from him, and the bending edges of the cuts gave the flat surface a certain relief. The artist often used various materials to create the “background” of the composition, placing fabric of different colours and textures under the holes.

– Fontana created several sculptures. At the beginning of his creative career, he created human figures that could be attributed to baroque or expressionism. His more mature work is abstract compositions created from a wide variety of materials. In the period between the first and second world wars, Fontana made compositions of bronze, terracotta, glass, concrete, plastic, experimenting with dimensions and techniques.

– In the late period of his work, the artist often used various decorative materials to create original works. These were brilliant paints, pieces of mirrors and glasses, sand mixed with paint. Fontana began to experiment with thick pasty layers of pigment, scratching a simple pattern on their surface and creating an interesting texture.

– The use of the latest technologies and the possibility of interaction between the viewer and the work of art laid the foundations for such popular contemporary movements as Environmentalism, Performance and Arte Povera. The most famous was the work of Lucio Fontana called “Spatial Environmental Engineering in Black Light”, which he created together with other Spatialist artists; it was an abstract form located in a dark room and painted with luminous fluorescent paints.