Lucio Fontana Drawings from 1934 to 1965

Lucio Fontana Disegni dal 1934 al 1965 1965

Date : 6 Apr 2019 6 May 2019

Artists : Lucio Fontana

Curator : Alessandro Azzoni

Short Review

Lucio Fontana's research is a research of fundamental importance for the history of twentieth-century art: his spatialist works, in which he crosses the two-dimensional surface of the work to find infinite possibilities in space, shake the Italian and world art scene since the late 1940s, break down the distinctions between painting and sculpture, between work and environment. The famous holes, the cuts, the first space installations have been imprinted in the common imagination – we can also admire the sculptures, the ceramics, the interior decorations. All this body of work, however, finds a founding basis in a constant, unstoppable practice, carried out for decades in which all the most ingenious Fontanian insights find their embryonic form: drawing. Fontana is first of all a sculptor: he works in his father's sculpture workshop in Argentina and then abandons the realistic style and transposes archipenko's Cubist lecture first, and that of Adolfo Wildt then, with whom he studied at the Brera Academy, in Milan, where he returned in 1927. Drawing, for the sculptor, is the tool to fix the idea with a few strokes before making it as a three-dimensional object. For Fontana,who instead intends to overcome both figuration and abstractionism, in the sign of a free action in space, borrowed from the dizzying inventions of the Baroque, drawing becomes a field to carry out the most daring research. With a simple stroke of pencil, nib or fast biro pen, Fontana transforms the sheet into a virtual place, where with a gesture he traces light and three-dimensional space in the two-dimensionality of the paper, without the need for academic constructions. The works on display at the Galleria d'Arte L'Incontro di Chiari offer an exhaustive anthology of this unstoppable production, returning gestures, projects and ideas of a freshness still unparalleled today. The thirty drawings on display, all archived at the Lucio Fontana Foundation and published in the fundamental Catalogue of reasoned works on paper range from 1934 to 1967, and go through the entire evolution of Fontana's research. Fontana's work on paper is immediately recognized by critics as a fundamental production, since the 1930s. In 1967 De Bartolomeis wrote in Segno antidisegno: "Drawing for Fontana means exploring the possibilities of expression, designing the use of formal tools, researching, testing the power of abstraction and thought; but it also means using a suitable means without the limitation of a preparatory act, precisely to maintain in the product the vitality and movement that he has put into the inventive gesture". From the older work, "Abstract Composition", an ink on paper from 1934, one can see how Fontana already tried to outline forms that freed himself from the formal restrictions of painting and sculpture. In the drawings of the 1940s there are human figures, studies for figurative sculptures that highlight the plastic awareness of the sculptural Fountain – but also the free use of the line to already outline "Spatial Concepts". It is in fact from 1947 the First Manifesto of Spatialism, which Fontana publishes together with Joppolo, Kaisserlian, Milani, where he writes "It is impossible that man from canvas, bronze, plaster, plasticine does not pass to the pure aerial image, universal, suspended, as it was impossible that graphite did not pass to canvas, bronze, plaster, plasticine." We could say that paper is the neutral place where this pure and universal image frees itself from the constraints of matter, and where the artist with the simple sign can outline it, as Fontana will do instead in the actual space of the first space installation Space environment with black light, 1948-49, set up at the Galleria Il Naviglio in Milan. It seems to continue to see those sinuous lines, almost biomorphic, or belonging to distant galaxies in the Space Concept Studies of 1957. Likewise, the sinuous forms of Fontana's free gestures in space can be found in the Space Environment Studies for the 1951 IX Triennale in Milan: Fontana represents on paper the famous scale of the Triennale, and tests in the image of the curved lines that develop free suspended in the environment. The installation will then be really realized by Fontana with a large suspended neon that draws a single extraordinary tangled gesture: this historic installation can still be admired at the Museo del Novecento in Milan. The sign drawn in pen on paper has become pure light. Also at the Museo del Novecento in Milan you can see the large ceiling of 1956, coming from the Hotel del Golfo dell'Isola d'Elba. Fontana translates his new conception of free art in space as a return to total work of art (space speaking), or reminiscent of the Baroque conception, if you will, in which the artist did not limit himself to circumscribing his art within the frame, or the wall, but permeated the entire structure, intervening on decorations, ceilings, lintels. And so does the figure of an artist who, after the avant-garde and abstractionism, returns to be the scorer of public commissions. So we see the Space Decoration Studies of '49 and '51, the Studies for Space Wall Decoration of 1960-61, the Space Wall Studies for the Milan Chamber of Commerce of 1957, the Studies for Interior Architecture of '52, where the holes of spatial concepts on canvas are scattered on architraves with a Cubist flavor. Also able is Tomba, studies for funeral chapel of 1956, where Fontana imagines a chapel dotted with signs for the entrepreneur Antonio Melandri, then actually built in '59 in Faenza but rediscovered only in 2006. The pinnacle of Fontana's client work will be the competition of the Quinta Porta del Duomo in Milan in 1950, won ex aequo with Luciano Minguzzi: fontana's extraordinary baroque plaster sketches had been considered too daring, too modern, and the door was finally assigned to Minguzzi. But Fontana's search for sacred symbolism is not interrupted: in fact, the three Ways of the Cross in terracotta tiles and glazed ceramics, made between 1947 and 1957, whose forms are found in Studio per Cristo of 1951, Deposition of 1955 and Studio per formelle of 1957, are famous. These sacred representations are outlined with baroque freedom with twisted signs and decisive chiaroscuri: the bodies will become matter, the spaces will be rendered with scratches and cuts on terracotta. As Enrico Crispolti writes: "By outlining image contours, the sign, especially if in pen, detaches from the materiality of the whiteness of the sheet, in the same way as the engraved sign, in the reliefs, circumscribes a presence of figure idea by configuring it dialectically within a material context, such as terracotta; concept and matter." But Fontana never abandons the study of the human figure, at the base of every volume, of every idea of boccionian movement memory. And copious is the production of drawings of female nudes: sometimes similar to archaic matron (Nudo femminile, 1958-60, Nudi femminili, 1951) sometimes portrayed (Female portrait, 1956), sometimes women portrayed in modern poses (Female figure, 1960-64), even with heeled shoes (Female Nude, 1958-60). Fontana himself, in an interview with Mario Pancera in 1962, says: "... On Sundays I draw. A model comes here and I fill folders on folders of female nudes. I'm doing this to keep myself up and about. Almost covertly. No one bothers me on party days." Finally, there is no lack of testimonies of Fontana's continuous research of new solutions for works that are used in space, that are filled with holes or cuts, that take on ever new forms (Studies for "Spatial Concept", 1960-61 and 1962-63). Starting from '64 Fontana conceives the Teatrini:scenes in lacquer wood that frame a space of possibility furrowed by holes; the drawings from '64 to '67 show the tireless search for ever new forms, formal solutions, unpublished abstractions, continued until the artist's death in 1968.