Spatial Concept: Expectation

Lucio Fontana, 1960 · Gallery 405 · Floor 4

So. Fontana said this. "I pierce this canvas that was the basis of all art, and I have created an infinite dimension." Okay. It's a brown canvas with one cut in it. So what the hell is he talking about? Well, Fontana thought painting was basically finished. He'd already tried leaving it behind. Nine years before the first cut, he blacked out a gallery in Milan. Hung a fluorescent paper-mâché shape from the ceiling. Turned on ultraviolet lights. You didn't stand in front of it. You walked into it. Six days later, it was gone. That's what he was after. Light. Color. The room itself. The cut is him trying to make a canvas do the same thing. Fontana started as a sculptor. He'd been one for more than thirty years before the first cut. He started in his father's shop in Argentina, making monuments for cemeteries. Tombstones. Angels. A sculptor doesn't fake a back. He makes one. So when Fontana comes back to the canvas, he doesn't fake it in paint. He pulls a blade through it. And he gets one shot. If the cut goes wrong, there's no painting over it. The whole canvas goes. "You have no idea how much stuff I throw away," he said. Now get close. This one landed. It isn't some wild slash. He works the opening with his hands. Wide through the middle. Pointed at either end. The edges turned slightly inward. And now there really is space behind the painting. Done. Except then he covers it up. Black gauze, glued across the back. That's the darkness in the cut. Not the room. Not infinity. Fabric. Without the gauze, the cut ends at the wall. With it, it keeps going. Fontana had a name for that black cloth. The teletta. The little canvas. So, to get beyond the canvas, Fontana cut through one. Then put another one behind it.

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