‘Einstein’s discovery of the cosmos is the infinite dimension, without end. And here we have the foreground, middleground and background, what do I have to do to go further? I make a hole, infinity passes through it, light passes through it…everyone thought I wanted to destroy; but it is not true, I have constructed.’—Lucio Fontana

With multiple buchi (holes) of various sizes and shapes perforating its rich brown surface, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept), 1960, belongs to the artist’s remarkable Olii series, which dominated Fontana’s practice from the late 1950s until his death in 1968. These boldly coloured monochrome canvases coarsely penetrated by one or many holes offered a distinctive counterpoint to Fontana’s Tagli paintings of the same period, with their crisply minimalist, almost surgical slices which betray no hint of the artist’s hand. The Olii, by contrast, offer a more raw and primitive perspective on Fontana’s effort to disrupt the pictorial plane in search of a fully Spatialist understanding of art. Organic and visceral, the present work is scattered with buchi, some seemingly created with the smallest of puncture marks, others ripping through the canvas and measuring a few centimetres in length. The perforations punctuate the paint surface, creating a charged energy that is accentuated by irregular daubs of black and white oil paint and the varying thickness of the brown. The holes and oil paint marks seem to dance around each other, evoking an electric frenzy of energy that animates the surface of the work, and almost seems to explode into the surrounding space.

Central to Fontana’s artistic practice was the search for a new visual language that expressed both the exhilaration and the existential anxiety of the modern age. ‘The man of today’, Fontana once noted, ‘is too lost in a dimension that is immense for him, it is too oppressed by the triumphs of science, is too dismayed by the inventions that follow one after the other, to recognise himself in figurative painting. What is wanted is an absolutely new language’ (quoted in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 260).

By 1960, when the present work was executed, mankind has achieved previously unimaginable advances in science and technology, sending first satellites and then cosmonauts into space. Man’s extraordinary rupture of the fabric of the universe seems echoed in Fontana’s canvas, with the scattered buchi and energetic paintwork alluding to cosmic matter and asteroids in outer space, as well as the uncertain trajectory of humanity in this great unknown. Indeed, as Fontana once noted of the striking colours in which he rendered his Olii, ‘The colour of the grounds of these canvases is a bit loud, [indicating] the restlessness of contemporary Man. The subtle tracing, on the other hand, is the walk of Man in space, his dismay and fear of getting lost; the slash, finally, is a sudden cry of pain, the final gesture of anxiety that has already become unbearable’ (quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p, 90).

The deep brown surface of the canvas is powerfully suggestive of the unknown infinity of space, lending further layers of symbolism to the work. Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale offers a rich and restless meditation on the potent forces that inexorably shape the very world.