Lucio Fontana began to puncture his canvases with holes (or buchi) around 1949, and then concurrently developed the gesture in his ceramic works. In one regard, the holes simply mark the movement of the artist’s hand, much like the brushwork in Abstract Expressionist painting. Yet for Fontana the perforations were more significant—by literally ripping into the pictorial surface, Fontana opened up the picture plane, the space occupied by the viewer, to the space that lies beyond. Fontana understood this gesture and its result as a penetration into the limitless possibilities of a boundless universe, stating “I make a hole…and from there I enter into infinity.”

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