Was Lucio Fontana an artist solely expressing the angst and physical scars left by the ravage of war when he decided to slash one canvas or perforate another with tiny holes? Or were Fontana’s holes and slashes some sort of visual openings onto a new world, a brave new world where limits were pushed back to leave war as far behind as possible? If at first sight these scars may look threatening, almost morbid for some, I think they actually have more to do with life than death. Surprisingly, Fontana started as a sculptor. Three-dimensionality and the importance of negative space were part of his formative vocabulary but his very personal obsession lied with spatialism, or the creation of space. As Sculpture only occupies space, this medium failed to fulfil such endeavour. Yet am I the only one to see an early “slash”, an opening in this early Olympic Champion from 1932? What about these tiny little holes in Spatial Ceramic (1953) juxtaposed with this Concetto Spaziale (1949)? In the 1950’s, at a time when the “Space Race” between the Soviet Union and the US was raging, Fontana’s personal quest became none other than a breathing space for minds traumatized […]
Seeing two Miró tapestries making the news for being restored in record time to make the opening of a focused exhibition in Venice after the Serenissima suffered one of its worst floods in years, reminded me of all the beautiful tapestries I have recently had the privilege to put my eyes on. Perhaps we too often think of tapestries as an antiquated art form, hovering on the walls of darkened galleries, so I am hoping to change your view just a little, after I share a few of my recent art adventures in pictures. But before we get to this beauty…
We all recognize the flags, targets, numbers or colors, these motives Jasper Johns has used in his art since the mid 1950s. They are omnipresent signs in our everyday life. We are drawn to them instinctively as they are instantly recognizable and neatly sum up abstract concepts we may find hard to describe with words. We see the signs but are we fully awake to the concepts? Try this with the American flag, for instance. If you think about it long enough, one ideal and many ideas are encapsulated in this flag…