"As with the buchi, Fontana viewed the violation of the pictorial plane as a profoundly constructive act, one that transforms the canvas into a membrane that allows the viewer to transcend experientially the physicality of the matter before him. The tagli also added the dimension of time, as the viewer, while looking at the cut, mentally retraces the act of perforation. Time and space are thus folded into one. In these works Fontana made his final and most fully realized attempt at the concetto spaziale. 'With the taglio,' he said, 'I have invented a formula that I think I cannot perfect....I succeeded in giving those looking at my work a sense of spatial calm, a cosmic rigor, of serenity with regard to the Infinite. Further than this I could not go'."
pg. 58
"Allowing the viewer to see the painted sides of the work, even if he never chooses stretchers of extreme depths, emphasizes its objecthood and delimits the expansion of the color space."
pg. 69
"'The taglio,' Fontana famously said in 1962, 'is an act of faith in Infinity'. The artist understood the Infinite not only as a physical space beginning at the surface of the earth but also, and most of all, as the vastness of the human mind. The tagli are a gentle invitation to follow his example, to break through the limits of consciousness in the search for what lies beyond form. Perhaps nothing marks Fontana's philosophical modernity more clearly than his understanding of nothingness not as pure negation but as an opening into possibility, a point of departure for artistic research. And to reach the immaterial, he had first to work through the material."
pg. 89
A Gottschaller
Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials
Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment