Roman retrospective for Lucio Fontana
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When a new Tornabuoni branch was born, the gallery – founded in Florence in 1981 by Roberto Casamonti – opened its programming with Lucio Fontana. It is now a kind of ritual. Once again, with the inauguration of the new Roman satellite – a stone’s throw from Piazza di Spagna, Tornabuoni is dedicating a retrospective to the great artist. The exhibition presents a variety of works that reflect Fontana’s journey towards Spatialism and ends, also visually, at a glance on the extreme wall of the long corridor-telescope, with the glazed terracottas of the Way of the cross (1947). The figures emerge from the background with their excited dynamism. The only ones among the stations that differ in the shades and the static nature of the main subject are: Jesus comforts the pious women – VIII station, 1947 e Jesus dies on the cross – XII station.
The curatorship has always been entrusted to Enrico Crispolti, who passed away in 2018, for this reason it is devoted to his memory and makes use of the critical contribution of Luca Massimo Barbero.
The cuts
The itinerary begins with a gouache on paper, black on a purple ground, Space environment of 1948, therefore of the year following the gestation of Via Crucis. We then move on to Spatial concepts from 1953, red and brown on a white background with red glass splinters, from 1956 fat pastel, glass and holes on black velvet, from 1957 with mixed technique and sequins. Finally, the next step: i cuts between 1959 and 1960 they begin to take on a “more imperative and solitary character”, as seen in Attese of ’59 where the cutter passes diagonally across the shaped canvas worked with dark blue-grey water-based paint or in the sample with three cuts made vertically on the intense orange hexagonal surface. A riot of pictorial material with a Baroque character can be found instead in the Spatial concept from 1961 with the green and gold paint distributed on the canvas in cursive furrows and transversal waves by means of digital pressure; the extremely carnal slit has slightly extroverted edges with the teeth of the cut visible.
As Crispolti writes, Fontana manages to purify “the surface from the material hypertrophy of the Informal” and in the Attese series of 1964-1965 this becomes evident: the cut is increasingly clear and clean, the gash opens onto a black space potentially infinite. It closes the circle Spatial concept. The end of God apple green shaped canvasparticularly brilliant, part of the series that will be defined by Gillo Dorfles “the eggs”.
In the margin we use his words: “The egg: the germ, the embryo of a new being; but also the spiritual matrix, the microcosm, the form that in itself includes every future existence; and also the Easter egg, the traditional symbol of the Resurrection, the symbol of a double birth. The giant egg: synonymous with the World and Creation: a formative and formative force, which is no longer that of the Sphere with its perfect circumference but that of a sphere that collapses, flattens, tends downwards, heavy, pregnant with its forces included, such as the drop, the seed, the pistil, the alembic”.
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