From "La Fotografia" by Ugo Mulas - Giulio Einaudi Editore Torino 1973
I was a friend of Lucio Fontana, as we all were here in Milano, one of his many friends. Except for some work for the Biennales, I always worked for him without him asking me: when I felt like seeing what he was up to I would give him a call, arrive with my camera, without a tripod, without lights, which did not make things complicated, and I would photograph. Of all the photographs, only one series - practically made in the space of half an hour - has a precise meaning.
Until that moment I had just photographed him and that was it, now I finally wanted to understand what he was doing. Perhaps it was the presence of a white canvas, large, with a single slash, just finished. That canvas made me understand that Fontana's mental operation (which was resolved practically in an instant, in the gesture of slashing the canvas) was far more complex and the final gesture revealed it only in part.
Seeing a canvas of holes, or a canvas of slashes, it is easy to imagine Fontana while he makes the slash with a blade or the holes with an awl, but this does not allow one to understand the operation which is more precise and is not just an operation, but a particular moment, a moment that I understood I had to photograph.
I thought of capturing him while he worked, but Fontana did not want to, and he explained the reason to me.
If you photograph me while I make a canvas of holes after a while I no longer notice your presence and my work proceeds calmly, but I couldn't make one of these big slashes while someone moves around me. I feel that if I make a slash, just like that, just to take the photo, it surely won't work... maybe, it could even succeed, but I don't feel like doing this thing in the presence of a photographer, or anyone else. I need a lot of concentration. I mean, it's not like I walk into the studio, take off my jacket, and slash! I make three or four slashes. No, sometimes, the canvas, I leave it hanging there for weeks before being sure of what I will do with it, and only when I feel sure, I start, and it is rare that I ruin a canvas; I really have to feel in the right form to do these things.
Perhaps I have not reported Fontana's words in precise terms and perhaps I will have added something of my own, because so much time has passed, but it was then that I understood how the preparatory moment, the one that precedes the slash, was the most important, the decisive one. So I begged Fontana to pretend to make some slashes. So we put a new canvas on the wall, and Lucio behaved as he does when he waits to make a slash, with his Stanley knife in hand, leaning against the canvas, up high as if the work were beginning in that instant: you see him from behind, you see a canvas where there is nothing yet, there is only a canvas and him in the attitude of someone who is starting to work on it.
It is the moment in which the slash has not yet begun and the conceptual elaboration is instead already all clarified. That is, when the two aspects of the operation meet: the conceptual moment that precedes the action, because when Fontana decides to start he already has the idea of the work and the executive aspect of realizing the idea. Perhaps precisely because of this concentration and conceptual expectation Fontana called his slash canvases "expectations".
Having taken this photo we removed the canvas and replaced it with a finished canvas made of a single large slash. Fontana put his hand at the terminal point of the slash and in one of the photos I took Fontana's hand is blurred as if he had just completed the stroke in that very moment: one cannot tell that this is a photo made on purpose where the slash pre-exists.
