Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - (Concetto spaziale) La fine di Dio

signed 'l. Fontana' (upper left); signed 'l. fontana' (on the reverse) and titled '"N 7 LA FINE DI DIO"' (on the stretcher) - oil on canvas - 70 1/8 x 48 3/8in. (178 x 123cm.) - Executed in 1964 - Estimate on request

Provenance: Galerie Iris Clert, Paris.
Private Collection, Germany (1968).
Anon. sale, Christie's London, 4 December 1996, lot 40.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature: A. Crespo, 'Forma nueva El Immueble' in El Pensamiento y la Obra de Lucio Fontana, Madrid, March 1967 (illustrated in colour, p. 55).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environnements spatiaux, vol. II, Brussels 1974, no. 64 FD 4 (incorrect provenance listed, illustrated, p. 138).
Bolaffiarte, Turin, April 1980 (illustrated, p. 62).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo generale, vol. II, Milan 1986, no. 64 FD 4 (provenance partially incorrect, illustrated, p. 473).
City Tele, no. 38, Vienna 1996 (illustrated, p. 39).
Kunst Forum, no. 135, Cologne, October 1996 (illustrated, p. 376).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. II, Milan 2006, no. 64 FD 4 (provenance partially incorrect, illustrated, p. 667).

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Iris Clert, Les oeufs célestes, February 1964.
Wuppertal, Kunst und Museum Verein, Hommage à Fontana, September-November 1969, no. 34 (illustrated, unpaged).
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Lucio Fontana, April-June 1972, no. 186 (illustrated, p. 234).
Munich, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Lucio Fontana, December 1983-February 1984, no. 92 (illustrated, p. 113). This exhibition later travelled to Darmstadt, Mathildenhöhe, April-May 1984 and Bielefeld, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, August-September 1984.
Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Bilderstreit. Widerspruch, Einheit und Fragment in der Kunst seit 1960, April-June 1989, no. 216, p. 513.
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Lucio Fontana, June 1996-September 1996, no. 62 (illustrated in colour, p. 103 and detail illustrated in colour, on the back cover). This exhibition later travelled to Vienna, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, September 1996-January 1997.
Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München, Lucio Fontana. La fine di Dio, November 1998-February 1999 (illustrated in colour, p. 31).
Verone, Palazzo Forti, Lucio Fontana, metafore barocche, October 2002-March 2003, no. 45 (illustrated in colour, p. 126).

Notes: The 'Fine di Dio' are a series of thirty-eight oval-shaped oil paintings made between March 1963 and February 1964 that are widely regarded as the supreme encapsulation of Lucio Fontana's 'Spatialist' art and the culmination of what he once described as his life-long artistic 'research'.

Strange, mysterious and imposing, these punctured monochrome canvases in the shape of an egg are more than mere paintings. They are 'spatial concepts' that invoke the fundamental mystery of the cosmos by being holistic, self-contained entities, which, through the archetypal, regenerative and even mystical form of the egg, aim to express the alpha and the omega of all existence - the beginning of the universe and its end. Like galaxies, paradoxically both open and enclosed to the space that they inhabit, these inter-dimensional paintings, seemingly both two and three-dimensional, and invoking the fourth dimension of time or space/time as well, are mysterious, fascinating and also somehow strangely familiar. It was Fontana's aim with these oval canvases to embrace unity and diversity and in so doing, to convey on a personal level, a profound sense of the perpetual transmutation of material into space, the relationship between time, gesture and eternity and even of the existential fear and loneliness of man lost in the vast unknowable and infinite void of Space.

For Fontana, the dawn of Space age in the late 1950s and early '60s marked the beginning of an entirely new era in the evolution of man. A new age in which, the artist, like the scientist, would now have to contend with and adapt to a vision of the world constituted solely by time, matter, energy and above all Space. In practical terms, Fontana's radical solution to the problems demanded by this new age were the hole and the cut (the buchi and the tagli) - two dynamic gestural and penetrative acts made on the canvas that in perforating it, infused its flat two-dimensional surface with real space, opened it to the void and instantaneously established it as part of the Einsteinian dimension of space/time.

Fontana's incisions into the flat plane whereon an illusional representation of life had previously been rendered throughout the entire history of art effectively destroyed the canvas as a bearer of illustrative meaning. Acting as a vital and invigorating spatial marks or signs on the material surface of the canvas plane, Fontana's punctured holes and gestural cuts also fixed each work and the energised transformative act of their creation to a specific point and place in time. In so doing, they added a temporal dimension, one that, paradoxically, infused the work with a sense of the eternal. For, in the very moment of Fontana's destructive act of piercing the canvas, an energised new space or void within that material was created - a space that, despite the passage of time and any material decay of the canvas around it, would, Fontana believed, always exist. 'Art is eternal as gesture, but not as matter', Fontana asserted. Like the spirit of man, as opposed to his body, which will perish, the work of art, as a material object, is temporal and mortal, but the spirit and energy of a gestural or creative act, resounds, in an infinite and timeless universe, forever.

Indeed, Fontana believed that the infinite dimension of space would, ultimately, render all art objects extinct, and this belief also extended to his notion of God. Seeing the potential revelations of the space age in fundamentally mystic terms, Fontana recognised man's move into space as not just a moment of scientific awakening but also as one of spiritual liberation. The infinity of space would force man to recognise that he is 'nothing...that he is pure spirit', Fontana observed. When this revelation was accepted, man would, he insisted, 'no longer have materialistic ambitions...(he) will become like God, he will become spirit. This is the end of the world and the liberation of matter, of man.' The new Spatialist age would inevitably bring about not merely the end of art, but of also of man's concept of God. 'The religions, too, must adapt themselves to the state of science' Fontana recognised. It was this portentous, radical and mystical aspect of his Spatialist research that reached its finest, and deepest expression in the 38 egg-shaped canvases to which he gave the prophetic title, 'la fine di Dio' - the End of God'.

The egg, of course, is a powerful mystical image. A symbol of birth and, in Christian iconography, an image of the Resurrection, this round, holistic and organic form, also represents unity, harmony and a sense of a fundamental order, the cyclical passing of time, (life, death and resurrection), and the ancient law of eternal recurrence. It is the perfect image with which to represent the unknowable, unfathomable unity of the cosmos. Executed to the same dimensions as Fontana's own height, so that the viewer could gain an intimate and personal sense of revelation from these works, Fontana's first fine di Dio were executed in 1963 and marked the culmination of a series of spatial experiments in oil paint, known as the Olii. Painted in predominantly green and pink, two colours that reflected the landscape and the flesh of man respectively, i.e. the physical and material nature of the world from which man, as spirit, was to be set free by space, these early versions, concentrated on the spatial breakout from the material world. They consisted largely of flat planes of monochrome canvas punctured relatively sparsely with only a few large hand-made holes that Fontana had clawed through the canvas.

Concetto spaziale La Fine di Dio (FD 4) of 1964 is one of the last fine di Dio works that Fontana made for the exhibition held at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris in February 1964 and entitled Les Oeufs célestes (The Astral Eggs). As its title suggests, the Fine di Dio that were made for this exhibition aimed to express a far stronger sense of the cosmic mystery of space than the earlier ovals which tended to concentrate more on the physical drama of the puncturing of the canvas and the spatial penetration of its material surface. As in FD 4 the number of cuts and holes in the canvases produced for the Iris Clert show was far greater than in earlier works, with often, as here, the myriad of incisions made in such as way that they resemble a galaxy of stars. Indeed, so enamoured of this later more astral look to these works was Fontana, that he even returned to several of his earlier Fine di Dio adding further punctures to them and in some cases even resurfacing them with golden brown pigment and sequins, to further the stellar effect of their surfaces.

These glittering versions of the Fine di Dio displayed the same Baroque showiness that distinguished Fontana's 1962 Venice cycle of paintings and were clearly aimed at invoking a predominantly ethereal sense of the mystery and wonder of Space. In contrast, those oil works, such as FD4, that were made specifically for this show using just a monochrome painted surface, concentrated solely on the simple iconic power of Fontana's conceptual cosmic egg. In these works Fontana developed the techniques of his Olii to new extremes, contrasting the smooth materiality of the oil surface of the paintings with the myriad pattern of perforations to generate a new and spectacular combination of spatial feeling and organic form. Resembling the appearance of cell structures seen under the microscope as much as they do a galaxy of stars, these monochrome astral oils rendered in pink, white, yellow and black represent the ultimate bringing together of microcosm and the macrocosm and invoke a cohesive and universal sense of the inherent mysticism within the spatial penetration of material.

As an archetype of divine Creation, the egg is, of course, also a potent symbol of holistic union - one that bridges the organic worlds of nature, life and matter and that of the more mystical and unknown realms of death, space, infinity, oblivion and the spirit. Fontana's bringing together of these extremes within one united symbol of harmony, birth and regeneration in these works, is essentially an hermetic act reflecting the fundamental belief of alchemists and other hermetic philosophers that the universe was itself an holistic and symmetrical entity: 'as above so below'. In addition, Fontana's mystical translation of the concept of the penetration of matter by space into a metaphor for the spiritual transformation of man - his notion that the body of man would be transformed into pure spirit - is also an hermetic concept, mirroring the aims of the alchemists in their search for the sacred spirit or elixir of life hidden within the body of matter.

More than in other works, it is in Fontana's last Fine di Dio, (les Oeufs célestes) and particularly such pink, flesh coloured works such as FD4, that this mystical concept of the transmutation of body into soul flesh into spirit is especially indicated. The dramatic, stark and repetitive contrast between the pink, oily, flesh-like surface of the work and the empty, dark, impenetrable black holes of space in the material surface invoke as much a sense of the material transformation of the work into space as they do the sense of the wounding or screams of existential and physical pain expressed in the earlier Olii. Here, the repetitive violence of Fontana's attacks on the canvas paradoxically, also adds to the cosmic splendour of the painting as a whole. Each puncture, each wound in the skin of the canvas is also a spiritual release. In this way, this pink cosmic egg becomes not only an image of physical transformation but also one of martyrdom, transcendence and change. In other words it is a powerful material expression not only of the transmutative concept that lay at the heart of all Fontana's Fine di Dio but also that this spiritual as well as physical journey of man into space and his eventual evolution from material (body) into space (spirit/soul) would not be without pain and sacrifice. As he told Mario Pancera, the slashes and punctures of his canvases were ultimately spatial representations of 'man's suffering in space, the suffering of the astronaut, who is squashed and compressed with instruments penetrating his skin...The man who flies in space is a new kind of man, with new sensations, above all painful.' (Fontana cited in Lucio Fontana exh. cat. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 244.)

Simultaneously symbolising the penetration of matter by space and the absorption of this space into the material - a metaphor for the spiritual penetration of matter and that material's transmutation into spirit - Fontana's 'astral eggs' stand as powerful mystic symbols of the constantly changing and ongoing evolutionary process of the entire universe. This holistic image is reinforced in these last works not just by the oval form but also by the elegant way in which Fontana has traced within this, one single fine line of circumference that, like the mystic snake around the Orphic world egg, encloses their galaxy of perforations into a contained unity. It is in this respect that these last Fine di Dio, assert themselves as unforgettable icons of a cosmic consciousness and as portraits of the Spatialist mind. Merging notions of the body as matter and the mind as spirit, they blend the worlds of science and art into a new archetype. Intended as perhaps the very last material works of art to be made by man, the Fine di Dio are deceptively simple and powerfully resonant works that reflect this by being material entities which appear to be dissolving and opening up into space before our eyes. The last marker stones of the materialist world of man before a new Spatialist age of the spirit, these permeated ovals are ultimately mere signposts on the road to a new age of the spirit among the stars.

'Let's not be romantic...In 500 years time people will not talk of art, they will talk of their problems and art will be like going to see a curiosity - like the two rocks put together by the first caveman. What were they up to? Why did they cover walls with pictures? Today man is on earth and these are all things that man has done while on earth, but do you think man will have time to produce art while travelling through the universe? He will travel through space and discover marvellous things, things so beautiful that things here - like art, will seem worthless. Today's young people too are still tied to the earth. Man must free himself completely from the earth, only then will the direction that he will take in the future become clear. I believe in man's intelligence - it is the only thing in which I believe, more so than in God, for me God is man's intelligence - I am convinced that the man of the future will have a completely new world. ' (Lucio Fontana, 'Last Interview with Tommaso Trini,' July 19, 1968, in Lucio Fontana exh. cat. London, 1988,

Christie's London. Post War and Contemporary Art. 30 June 2008