Gestural, dynamic and dramatic, this swirling Crucifixion reflects Lucio Fontana’s fascination with the Italian Baroque. For Fontana, Baroque art represented space with unsurpassed magnificence; painted figures seemed to abandon the flat surface of the canvas, reaching into our own space. Vigorously modelling and moulding the wet clay, and adding highlights of paint after firing, Fontana created a highly textured, tactile, and multi-faceted work whose protrusions and cavities coalesce and integrate with the surrounding space. Blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the present work epitomises the artist’s concern with formal qualities at its purest.
Baroque art played a significant role in Fontana’s philosophy and oeuvre. Between 1953 and 1957, he created a series of Barocchi (Baroques), paintings which united ideas and techniques of seventeenth-century art with a futuristic exploration of space. Their narrative use of colour and extremes of light and shadow evoked historical Italian precedents, in particular the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, which can likewise be found in the present work.
Fontana once noted the role the Baroque played in stirring his vision for an artistic revolution: “A change is necessary both in essence and form. It is necessary to overturn and transform painting, sculpture, and poetry. A form of art is now demanded which is based on the necessity of this new vision. The baroque has guided us in this direction, in all its as yet unsurpassed grandeur, where the plastic form is inseparable from the notion of time, the images appear to abandon the plane and continue into space the movements they suggest. This conception arose from man’s new idea of the existence of things; the physics of that period reveal for the first time the nature of dynamics. It is established that movement is an essential condition of matter as a beginning of the conception of the universe…” (quoted in Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006, p. 229).
Although this Crucifixion may appear radically removed from the figurative sculpture of the preceding centuries, elements including the subject matter, and conscious use of gold paint, with a violent smudge of red denoting Christ’s wound, reveal Fontana’s engagement with the great tradition of Christian imagery that came before him. This artwork thus simultaneously acknowledges the great precedent of religious sculpture while overturning convention and laying the foundations for the artist’s pioneering experiments that would characterise the 1950s and 1960s.
This artwork is accompanied by a certificate from the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, no. 4237/3.
