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Lucio Fontana
An attempt to connect sounds with vision.
1. "Like his home country of Japan, Ryuichi Sakamoto can be categorised completely objectively under one word: pioneering. He's an old man now, but whilst many might associate age with being stuck in the past or unable to change, Sakamoto has led his career on exactly opposite principles. Born in 1952, he's lived a life that's found it's own chronological parallels in music. As a young boy learning piano, he became fascinated by Debussy. As a teenager, he found himself listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and later on - much to the disapproval of his classical teachers - electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk." text via here.
2. Concetto Spaziale, Attese, executed in 1960, is an important work in the oeuvre of Lucio Fontana that has been an undeniable highlight in Andy Warhol’s collection until his death in 1987. It is an outstanding example of the work to come out of the Spazialismo (Spatialism) movement, founded by the artist in 1947. Six carefully remeditated cuts run across the thinly painted monochromic canvas, emphasising the physicality of this work. It is charged with energy of the physical act of the artist slashing the surface with the knife. This physical act or gesture became the central idea of Spatialism, to the extent that it figured in the movement’s ‘First Spatial manifesto’: “it doesn’t matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal” (in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato, eds., Lucio Fontana, Milan, 1998, p. 118). Through the use of gesture, Fontana was in fact one of the first artists to perceive art as a performance. In the ‘Technical Manifesto of Spatialism’, Fontana elaborates on Spatialism’s ambitions: “Painted canvas no longer makes sense… What is needed… is a change in both essence and form. It is necessary to go beyond the painting, sculpture and poetry… In the praise of this transformation in the nature of man, we abandon the use of known forms of art and move towards the development of an art upon the unity of space and time” (in M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London, 2001, p. 88). via here.
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