“Today I’m leaving for Paris” and “Today it’s the first of October”, Lucio Fontana wrote on the back of two of his paintings in 1964 and 1965.
Fontana often wrote such messages on the back of his works to prove they were original paintings, but, as the years passed, the cryptic sentences turned into a sort of secret diary left by the artist.
The two sentences recently inspired also the biggest and most important Lucio Fontana exhibition after the one organised at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in the late ‘80s and after the event organised at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 17 years ago.
The exhibition, entitled “Today, 1st October I’m leaving for Paris”, features around 70 works between paintings and sculptures from the 50s until the late 60s.
Space is obviously one of the main themes of this event and it’s explored through Fontana’s slashed paintings.
The holes and slashes the artist pierced his canvases with were a way to go beyond the surface and explore the hidden dimensions beyond the canvas, that microcosmic free space Fontana was so fond of and about which he stated “My discovery was the hole and that’s it. I’m happy to go to my grave after such a discovery.”
Pushed by the desire to achieve a sort of sculptural relationship with the canvas, Fontana developed his Pietre, Gessi and Barocchi series.
The latter offered him the chance of exploring elaborate surfaces, building thick surfaces using asphalt and glass and then painting them in bright colours.
The Paris exhibition chronicles all these developments in Fontana’s career, but it’s also an interesting event for people with an interest in fashion.
I have already mentioned Lucio Fontana in connection with a few fashion collections in a previous post and with Mila Schön’s designs, and I guess quite a few contemporary designers maybe tried to experiment with Fontana’s ideas about purity, space and surfaces.
Yet there is a link between Fontana and fashion that many people don’t actually know: a while back a document by Fontana was found among the papers of Milanese designer Germana Marucelli, known for her collaborations with different artists.
The paper was taken from one of Marucelli’s books - dated 1948-49 - on which guests to her Thursday evening meetings had left their signatures and messages.
The paper shows a drawing by Fontana of a vertical stroke accompanied by a small circle on one side. While the drawing evokes the first slashes that Fontana made ten years after, it also showed he was already interested in spatial studies.
Guess that while the Paris exhibition will maybe free visitors from "the slavery of the material" to paraphrase Fontana, it will also help people with an interest in fashion design to explore new spaces in and beyond fashion.
Hopefully, the connections between Fontana and fashion will also remind some designers and fashion houses out there that fashion is not about inviting bland pop stars to sing during your catwalk show to simply attract attention and money or pick vapid celebrities as your artistic directors, but it's mainly a form of art with a message within.
The Lucio Fontana exhibition is at 16 Avenue Matignon until 31 December 2009.
Add to Technorati Favorites
Lijit Search
Thankyou for a very entertaining and enlightening piece. It definitly opened my eyes to allot of things I had not thought of before.
Posted by: Gucci Shoes | May 11, 2010 at 11:30 AM
Now that you've been introduced to the different types of self storage offerings and the types of security available, you need to determine if self storage is right for you.
Posted by: glendale self storage | June 27, 2011 at 04:25 PM