Immagine: Io sono un santo (Lucio Fontana, 1958)
Traccia remixata: Pinocchio Techno (various authors)
Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an argentine-italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He is mostly known as the founder of Spatialism.
Born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina to Italian immigrant parents, he was the son of the sculptor Luigi Fontana (1865 — 1946). Fontana spent the first years of his life in Argentina and then was sent to Italy in 1905, where he stayed until 1922, working as a sculptor with his father, and then on his own. Already in 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young Argentine artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé.
Fontana exhibited his first Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (‘Spatial environment’) (1949) at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, a temporary installation consisting of a giant amoeba-like shape suspended in the void in a darkened room and lit by neon light. From 1949 on he started the so-called Spatial Concept or slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the surface of monochrome paintings, drawing a sign of what he named “an art for the Space Age”. He devised the generic title Concetto spaziale (‘spatial concept’) for these works and used it for almost all his later paintings. These can be divided into broad categories: the Buchi (‘holes), beginning in 1949, and the Tagli (‘slashes’), which he instituted in the mid-1950s.
Around 1960, Fontana began to reinvent the cuts and punctures that had characterized his highly personal style up to that point, covering canvases with layers of thick oil paint applied by hand and brush and using a scalpel or Stanley knife to create great fissures in their surface…
(Wikipedia source)
