Spatial concepts

                                                      ''My discovery was the hole and that’s it.'' (Lucio Fontana, 1968)

Concetto-spaziale-Attese-1965-no9

It would probably be more apt to say that painting did not simply disappear in Lucio Fontana's "discovery" of the hole, but that it was "absorbed" by its true medium (1), which is "space" itself. In other words, in his quest to incorporate space and time into the art form, Fontana broke down ''the distinction between the art object and the space around it" and opened up a radical moment of abstraction.

It is true that the buchi and the tagli which have become the main signature of his oeuvre can also be seen to be emphasizing the material substrate that supports the art object, dissolving all illusionist or ''retinal'' tendencies in art. The veil has been ripped open (or slashed), the fourth wall has been broken (or punctured), and "behind" or ''under'' it there is not more of Matter, or more of the Real. (Analogously, when we trace a line on the page, is that a fullness we see, or is it the dark crevice of infinite space? It is interesting to note that making ''holes'' was part of old forms of writing. The Greek word graphein even carried the idea of  ''scratching and scraping'' in its etymology.)

However, let us go one step further: there are actually only more holes, and perhaps only holes, nothing more. To add a hole in any material is arguably a ridiculous idea, given the fact that, microscopically, we know ''things'' are by nature full of empty spaces. This is why we need to underline the fact that Fontana only ''discovered'' the hole: he did not create it. No one creates what is already there to start with, and the art+object arrives only as a kind of ''differential conjuring'' of an event that cannot be created because it is already everywhere.

To bring together a claim of presence (''there are'') and a nominal category designating an absence (''holes'') may sound like an abuse of language dipping into nonsense. Yet, it is probably not more or less than catachretic to speak of concetto spaziale (''spatial concepts'') where the abstract and the concrete collide, mix, and interchange values. (We will cut off any foray into lexical histories by simply saying that the apparent opposition between concrete and abstract often neglects the fact that even the word ''concrete'' itself is as abstract as any other term.) In other words, the ''hole'' and the ''object'' are limit concepts without intrinsic value or form on their own. They can only exist as extensions of each other, never ceasing to revert into the other in order to open up the spaces of ''expectation'' (2).

What is hence ''demonstrated'' by Fontana's work is the paradoxical medium that merges or blurs the polar notions of Something and Nothing, Presence and Absence, Fullness and Emptiness (3). His work, which ''(breaks) down the distinction between the art object and the space around it," can be best described less as matter with holes than as holes with matter, bringing us closer, by a sort of retrospective foreshadowing, to ideas in contemporary quantum theory where nuclear particles are only excited states of the vacuum.

It is an almost impossible object, existing only as pure abstraction since, for Fontana, ''No form can be spatial.''  It is as if the artist were merely the continuation of Time itself. By raising abstraction (''drawing away,'' ''extraction,'' ''removal'') into a purely semiotic or symbolic gesture with no real metaphysical or demiurgic value, Fontana does nothing but resume the auto-generation of a primeval cosmic motion where the artist (4) is just another dynamic link or moment in the Void:

''Now in space there is no longer any measurement. Now you see infinity … in the Milky Way, now there are billions and billions … The sense of measurement and of time no longer exists, and so, here is the void, man is reduced to nothing … And my art too is all based on this  purity, on this philosophy of nothing, which is not a destructive nothing, but a creative nothing …  And the slash, and the holes, the first holes, were not the destruction of the painting… it was a dimension beyond the painting, the freedom to conceive art through any means, through any form'' (italics added).

All in all, this reminded me of  Maurice Blanchot's ''dead time'' and the space of writing. What interested me in Fontana is the way both the Mirror and the Window give way to the Medium, which is not an opacity blocking perception. The Medium, in fact, is everything, without measure or limit or end. It is what is more invisible than visible, like Frenhofer's canvas of the ''Unknown Masterpiece'' whose only actual reality resides simply on the fact of having been named in language.


1. ''Fontana’s painting represents neither destruction nor a reduction of painting. On the contrary, it is an eloquent visual argument for a radical expansion of the medium'' (italics added).  Anthony White, http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/no-form-can-be-spatial-the-origins-of-lucio-fontanas-spatial-concept-2/. Some quotes above were from White's essay.

2. Attese, ''expectation'' or ''waiting'' seems like an intriguing title, with all its nuance of delay, postponement, hoped for arrival, suspension, in short between being there and not being there, an imperfect absence or presence.
3. See, for example, Fontana's turn to ovoid formats, provocatively titled "La fine di Dio" (1964). It is perhaps an illustration of another critique of a plenitude at the center of the Egg, figural image of primordial creation.
4. ‘’The artist must have the courage to stop idolizing himself, to stop seeing himself as the centre of the earth and of all things.’’ An analogue, no doubt, of the death of the author in literature.