The art of the punch

In a few days of Italian electoral turmoil, I manage to visit in the privileged territory of the Fondazione Magnani-Rocca paduana, a rigorous presentation of the work of Lucio Fontana with the audacious title of Autoritratto.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
05 November 2022 Saturday 16:36
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The art of the punch

In a few days of Italian electoral turmoil, I manage to visit in the privileged territory of the Fondazione Magnani-Rocca paduana, a rigorous presentation of the work of Lucio Fontana with the audacious title of Autoritratto. A few days ago, I repeated the experience at the Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid, with another daring sample of the singular ceramics of the Argentine artist, imaginative creator of spatialism and pioneer of a formal dynamic outside of time: it was then the forties and the proposal was blinding . The cuts, perforations, punctures and holes on the clean surface of the canvas alerted us to the typical constructive two-dimensionality and foreshadowed the ideal advance of a severe intervention that combined beauty, agility and mastery.

Fontana died and I did not even get to see him at the 1966 Biennale, which he apparently visited, but I listened to the warm testimonies of students and collaborators of his teaching period at the School of Plastic Arts in Buenos Aires. A magnetic communicator, they claimed. The son of a sculptor, Fontana opted for dynamic objectivity with a futuristic tendency, but always close to the Abstraction-Creation movement in Paris, where he coincided with Brancusi and Miró. White Manifesto, in Spanish and from 1946, was his first call for attention. In 1947 he settled in Milan, where he drafted his steely spatialist manifestos, obsessed by the void that assaulted shocking perforations and perforated fabrics. The Buchi, which culminated in the Tagli and gave rise to the second Spatialist Manifesto of 1958. The celebrated ceramics – Nature – are sharp material warnings in terracotta that will lead to the abstraction of blank lunar spaces, so influenced by Arp, that they stood out in the aforementioned 1966 Biennale. The 1987 Paris retrospective, now posthumous, placed Fontana's masterpiece in the rising object and performative avant-garde.

In the mid-sixties –the artist died in the astral year 1968– his work will dazzle the art scene with punctures, gaps and voids that were not intended to deny the traditional structure of the framework but to prioritize a radical informalist gesture in a time of international reconstruction. The search for another expressive dimension, in short, that will soon overcome compositional occlusion and leave the visual imagination unhindered. Fontana wrote, in the sixties: "I have finished almost thirty balls in terracotta, with large cuts and holes..., it is nothing, the death of matter and the pure philosophy of life". Perhaps.

It is not a question of insisting once again on painting or sculpture as arts with an ancient history, but rather giving way to spatial experimentation forced now to glimpse the unexpected. The void completely permeates the work, adding suggestive architectural and light constructions to the ceramic with the sovereign intonations that we perceive in Siracusa and in the cinematographic adventures of Breda and Sidercomitz, already at odds with the metal industry. Not surprisingly, in 1957 Fontana had encountered in London the unlikely surprise of science fiction that would lead him to the versatility of the Hamilton Independent Group, with its eloquent and risky construction models – The House of the Future – in plastic and with a burning ephemeral will .

The final projects with an atmospheric bill – Ambient labyrinth – are presented to the viewer as steely challenges of disturbing space and light, which require exclusive, original and groundbreaking furniture. The overflowing ceramics that flood the aforementioned Madrid gallery these days allows the observer to evaluate the accurate formal investigation of an attentive and accomplished artist who admires Picasso and Miró, but who proposes an unprecedented language saturated with communicative possibilities. Unlimited space, historicist coloratura and serial incision had been leading artistic intuitions in Fontana's activity since the 1930s. Testa de ragazza , from those years, is a good example: a figuration that denies the linear aesthetics of cubism and advances the effort of abstract sculpture in cement, as the elegant cuts of the following decade also achieved. Il pane is a daring, perhaps improvised, but disturbing.

The casual return to the figure in the ceramics of the fifties, with an openly classicist and baroque theme, increases Fontana's communicative commitment, in effect, and expresses a refined formal selection. The variations on Minerva, in bronze, today at the Università Statale de Milan, are striking. The energetic slashes of the artist of the sixties, branches with lacerations or the incisive oval terracottas of the decade, undoubtedly represent Fontana's personal aesthetic legacy. His works are legendary pieces today, such as Il sole , in vermilion with thoughtful punctures in a circle or the subtle Atessa , resounding cuts on hydropainting that overwhelm the visitor at the Museo Novecento in Florence, also a serial synthesis of a new and witty practice of the boundless porteño , a pessimist converted to optimism. The artist confessed in the resounding founding manifesto: “All things arise out of necessity and value the demands of his time”. Modest and annoying truth that Fontana reveals to us.