"I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind me the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art – and I escape symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface."
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana maintained that his most important invention was the ‘hole’ (It. ‘buco’). This was in 1949, when he perforated sheets of paper and canvases with a chisel for the first time. A simple sculptural action that changed the rules of art for ever. Until then the surface of a canvas or sheet of paper had been nothing but a background on which the illusion of space unfolded in painting or drawing. But Fontana actually opened it up spatially.
The first works with holes are entirely white – a reference to the zero that Fontana wanted to indicate. Later he used coloured backgrounds and painterly compositions reminiscent of informalism. The perforations are rhythmically and often geometrically arranged. When they form circles or spirals we inevitably think of star systems. Fontana deliberately accentuated this impression by lighting his images from behind. For him the ‘hole’ was an instrument to expand consciousness – even into cosmic dimensions.
