A pervasive sense of gesture suffuses the composition of Concetto Spaziale, Attese. The varying length, breadth, and curve of each line impart a sense of rhythm, of crescendo and diminuendo, as they draw the viewer’s gaze across the canvas. These are marks that are inextricable from their production – they are as much recorded passages of action through time as they are articulations of space. Their manual realisation is wholly bonded with their aesthetic and the sense of sculptural confidence that they imbue confirms this as the work of an artist at the height of his powers.

Fontana’s work, and particularly his series of tagli, was closely linked with contemporaneous advances in space travel. Just as men like Yuri Gagarin broke through the atmosphere to reveal the infinite void of the cosmos, Fontana sliced open his canvas to reveal the void behind it and irrevocably changed the course of art. To this end, the telletta (the strips of black gauze positioned behind each cut) are as central to the interpretation of this work as the narrow slits themselves. They imply the blackness of space and the insurmountable nothingness of the cosmological void. In Fontana’s own words: “The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension. It is the infinite: thus I pierce this canvas, which is the basis of all arts and I have created an infinite dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary Art” (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 19). Through this paradigm-shifting series, Fontana asserts his own identity as a pioneer of painting and a founding father of contemporary art, perfectly positioned to lead the practice onwards into the second half of the Twentieth Century.

The present work is typical of Fontana’s tagli in its conceptual power, and exceptional amongst his oeuvre for its gestural grace and beauty. In puncturing the canvas he precluded the viewer from looking into the recessional folly of perspectival depiction, and in covering the air behind it with his black telletta, he forced the viewer to consider the emptiness of the cosmological void. This is a nuanced, delicate work, characterised by the balance of Fontana’s composition, and brought to life by the power of his convictions.