Lucio Fontana: the Slashes on Canvas that Redefined How Art is Created

With his spatial concepts and his redefinition of specific materials and dimensions, Argentinian-Italian artist Lucio Fontana is regarded as the father of midcentury Spatialism, while his provocative practice channelled postwar innovation in a pioneering synthesis of art, technology, and science. Fontana gained international acclaim in the mid-1950s with his slash series, for which he cut into the canvas surfaces of monochrome paintings to provoke a sense of depth unachievable with paint alone. Though the canvases came to dominate his outward canon, Fontana was, however, also exhibiting immersive artworks around the world as early as 1949, nearly two decades before artists James Turrell and Yayoi Kusama first developed their first atmospheric experiments in the late 1960s.

A Life Between Two Worlds

Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina in 1899, to an Argentinian mother and an Italian father. He moved to Italy after his parents separated in 1905, and through his schooling, was exposed to the ideals of Futurism and new ways of creating art. He served as a second lieutenant in World War I, discharged with a silver medal after sustaining an arm injury. After he returned home, he resumed his studies, becoming a master builder, which laid the foundation for his first sculptures.

Escaping the political turmoil of Europe, Fontana moved back to Argentina in 1921 and began making busts for his father’s workshop, which specialised in making sculptures for graveyards. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young Argentinian artists in Rosario de Santa Fé. On his return to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, where he studied under Symbolist sculptor Adolfo Wildt. In Italy, he was gaining critical acclaim for his sculptures featuring abstract human forms and unusual materials, such as Homo Nero (1930), which he layered with tar. He also spent time in Paris and learning from artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Joan Miró.

The Foundations Of Spatialism

Fontana lived and worked in Milan until 1940 when he moved back to Argentina again when World War II broke out. He became a teacher and founding member of the Altamira cultural centre. As the professor of sculpting, he helped to promote the school’s philosophy that in light of recent scientific discoveries, a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world. He encouraged his students to embrace new conceptual approaches to creating art, urging them to forsake painting to make innovative art, for example projecting light. By formulating his ideas on artistic research, he defined a new kind of art and rejected old traditions that laid out the foundations of the movement he started in 1946, which became known as Spatialism.

The main idea behind Spatialism was to create a form of art that would make a synthesis of sound, colour, movement and space in one single artwork. As he explained in Manifesto Blanco, his ultimate desire was to create a unity of art and space. “Colour, an element of space; sound, an element of time; and movement, unfolding in space and time,” Fontana wrote. Fontana was obsessed with the conceptual dimension of the art and perceived it as an instrument for research, rather than a mere matter of aesthetic. As he put it, “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.” He had called for an art that embraced science and technology and made use of icons of modernity such as neon light, radio and television.