Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept)

Lucio Fontana was part of a line of investigation that was looking for a new spatial definition for the pictorial medium, developed through the dematerialisation of the work, as clearly seen in the seven pieces in the Museo Reina Sofía collection, grouped under the generic title of Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept), 1950-1968. Fontana’s proposal is the abolition of illusory space and its substitution with real space, principles that he developed in his concept of Spatialism, published in the Manifiesto blanco of 1946. His theory materialised in spatial concepts, made up of monochrome works modified with buchi and tagli (holes and cuts), rips in the actual work that create a real, enveloping space, which the viewer becomes part of. So the work is centred on the material (in this case canvas) as an inert element with no communicative ability of its own, but with the potential to constitute conceptual inquiry. Fontana’s concept also transcends the traditional category of painting and its differentiation from sculpture with a work whose nature goes beyond the object, highlighting the contradiction between seriality and individual gesture, a concept that endorses the new artistic practises that were developing, as a paradigm shift in modernity, from the 1960s onwards.