Lucio Fontana (1899 to 1968) was an Italian-Argentine sculptor and painter who cut his canvases with a knife and called the opening space. Born in Rosario, Argentina, he trained in Milan, founded the movement known as Spatialism, and from 1958 made the slashed monochromes, the Tagli, that made his name. The cuts carry the title Concetto spaziale, Attese: Spatial Concept, Waiting.
Most people who meet a Fontana for the first time see an attack. A single clean wound in a flat red or white surface, and the question that follows: why would anyone do that to a painting?
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He was fifty-nine when he made the first cut of the series, and he had spent three decades as a sculptor before it. He used a Stanley knife, drew it through the painted canvas in one downward motion, then shaped the edges by hand, a gesture that one auction catalogue calls a caress. From 1959 he added black gauze behind each slit, so that the opening reads as depth and not as damage.
His own explanation was never about destruction. "My tagli are primarily a philosophical expression," he said, "an act of faith in the Infinite, an affirmation of spirituality." The man who said it had already pierced canvases with holes for nine years, built a room that glowed in black light, and bent more than a hundred meters of neon into the air above a Milan staircase.
What You'll Discover
Where a sculptor's story began.
What he built before the knife.
How a cut is really made.
What the word Attese means.
What happened in Venice in 1966.
How his last year ended.