Interview with Lucio Fontana by Mario Pancera

Artistic Vocation

If you were not a painter and sculptor, what would you like to be?

I would strive to be an artist again. Or a baker, in case I did not succeed. Since I invented the holes in paintings, they say I don't know how to draw! But we're joking. They don't know what a master I had.

An Eventful Life

Perhaps because you have led a life that was humanly and artistically eventful...

Certainly, I have never led a quiet life. Besides, I could not change either my ideas or my temperament.

In a year and a half of la dolce vita, between the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties the young Fontana squandered the fortune he had brought from overseas. Fontana recounts that, when the money ran out, his friends disappeared.

Desperate, I decided to die and for three days I did not touch food. In truth, I did not even have a cent to buy myself a sandwich. At the end of the third day, I realized that my demise would not solve anything, I gathered my last strength and decided to stay alive.

The Search for the Void

What is Fontana seeking with his way of making art?

I seek nothing, the void.

What does that mean?

Let's not misunderstand each other. The hole is the beginning of a sculpture in space. I try to unveil a mystery. I seek the beginning of the art that will be. The first man had neither oil nor brush: to paint he made a mark on sand. The first musician whistled: today there is dodecaphonic music. With the passage of time the means of expression have changed and, consequently, art has changed. About spatial art there is a misunderstanding encouraged by unserious people: a statue with a hole in the middle is not a spatial sculpture, it is just a statue with a hole in the middle. I try to escape from matter to reach the intelligence of man. Excuse me if I say some words in Spanish. My paintings do not incite hatred, but only reflection, humility, to be nothing.

Comparison with Cinema

Something like Michelangelo Antonioni in cinema?

Thirty years ago, Antonioni would not have thought of, nor been able to make, the cinema he makes today.

The Art of the Common Man

They say your art is difficult to understand.

On the contrary, it is very easy. It is the art of the common man. Don't you see the furnishings of cinemas, bars, the most modern public spaces? They are all my ideas: the slashes, the holes (are you familiar with the ceiling of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan?)¹ replace the ovals, the putti, the sirens, the rose windows of times past.

The Figurative and Tradition

And what about the figurative?

I will answer you with an apologue. Once, a long time ago, I made a painting with a religious subject and I painted the angels without wings. The priest who had commissioned it asked me why. And why should I have put them on?, I asked him. Because it is tradition, he replied. And the first one who made angels with wings, what tradition did he have?, I asked. The priest said nothing more. Heaven is everywhere, there is no need for wings. No matter how much of the universe we discover, we will always be at the beginning, but we don't want to realize it. We do not have enough humility.

The Meaning of Humility

What does humility mean?

For example, after Stalin's death in 1953 and the advent of Khrushchev, the Soviets abolished the cult of personality. Very well, I say. But then? Instead of all getting in line and marching under the empty podium, here is someone marching below and someone remaining above to be revered. Oh no! Humility must be complete, not half-hearted.

Reading and Hobbies

What does Fontana read?

I read little and I do not write. I do not read because I have nothing to learn: now it is up to the young people. I do not write because I have nothing to teach: sexagenarians who want to teach young people how to live make me laugh.

Do you have any hobbies?

Yes, beautiful girls.

Fellow Artists

What do you think of your colleagues?

Many things. Some of my colleagues engage in social polemics. Then they buy themselves a coup and a sixteenth-century castle.

Abstract Art and the Market

Is it true that abstract art, after the boom of the fifties, is in crisis?

By now they call everything abstract art. One should say informel.² However, I don't think so. It is a crisis of money. Is Cubism in crisis? No, it is finished. It has had its time, but the experience remains. In fact, the more years pass, the more the prices of Cubist masters increase. And so it is for the Surrealists, for the Futurists... I speak of the masters, not the copycats, who exist in all times, even today.

And your works?

They have an international quotation, based on a score, valid in Milan as in Paris as in New York. Who is in and who is out. I am in.

Spatialist Research

Do you continue your spatialist research?

After the holes and the slashes I have arrived at new fractures, at lacerations of the canvas.³ You see here? They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, crushed, compressed, with instruments embedded in the skin, is different from ours. I don't know if I am explaining myself. It is a new type of man who flies in space, with new sensations, especially painful ones. Even the colors of the canvases physically disturb. These shades of pink-violet are annoying, aren't they? I made several attempts before I got there. It is a new suffering that I try to express. Mine are not paintings, they are art concepts.

Sunday Drawing

So, have you abandoned the figurative forever?

No. On Sundays I draw. A model comes here and I fill portfolios upon portfolios with female nudes.⁴ I do it to keep in practice. Almost in secret. No one disturbs me on holidays. Even for spatial art you need to have culture. Many people think that the ideas of holes and slashes come down like manna!

The Sculptor's Anecdote

The painter Achille Funi told me some time ago that he has always struggled to paint, while you get away with a few blows of the awl on the canvas. He said it without envy, amused, but he said it.

I also know an anecdote, which I am assured is true. A well-known sculptor, I won't give you the name, but he is about my age, had been preparing for some time a statue of gigantic proportions, which had an arm raised towards the sky. One day, while he was giving the final touches to the hand, half the statue suddenly collapsed, not supporting its own weight. At a certain point between tears, curses and sighs, the distraught and desperate sculptor came out with this phrase: «Oh! el Lucio sì ch'el ghe l'ha induvinada! Lù con tri bus el fa i miliun sensa fadiga»!

Lucio Fontana smiles. His face of Jesuit and bon vivant, gaucho and banker, tango dancer and philosopher, rejuvenated by polemics, by battles and by two eyes as sharp as his holes, is radiant.

Humility is needed... humility.