Lucio Fontana

How many of us, faced with a Lucio Fontana canvas, have asked ourselves: “Is it really art, or just a cut canvas, pushed by art dealers and marketing? Or is there something more?” And how many have thought: “Yes, interesting, but ultimately it’s just a cut, period.”

After all, the art market thrives on this: a work recently purchased can, over the years and under the pressure of galleries and collectors, multiply in value. Illusion becomes reality, and the more concrete that reality appears, the greater the desire to own it.

The heart of Lucio Fontana’s spatial concept is simple and radical: the canvas is no longer simply a plane to be filled with colors and shapes, but a body to be traversed. With his cuts, the artist challenges centuries of painting as an illusory window: instead of simulating depth, he actually opens it.

For Fontana, space is not only the physical space behind the canvas, but also the infinite one glimpsed beyond. It is an art that engages with its time, with science, and with the era of space exploration. Painting is no longer enough: a language capable of conveying the perception of an expanding universe is needed. Thus, his Concetti Spaziali are not ruined paintings, but works that transform the canvas into a portal.

Emptiness is not negation, it is possibility, living energy. And here the metaphor can be expanded: I like to think, even if it’s not a concept directly expressed by the artist, that this refers to the void of quantum physics, a void that is never truly empty, but contains latent energy, potential waiting to emerge. In this sense, the cut becomes a symbol of a gateway to another dimension, both visible and invisible.

Fontana doesn’t abandon color or painting suddenly: he simplifies them, reducing them to supporting the essential gesture. Color and shape belong to an ancient language, confined within the confines of the canvas, and his journey gradually leads him to free himself from them. The cut then replaces painting: he no longer represents space with illusions of perspective, he truly creates it, opening a passage.

In this sense, the work is no longer just a painting, but a transformed object. It is not a window revealing something, but a presence that lives in the present, suspended between painting, sculpture, and architecture.