Artist: Lucio Fontana, Born Argentina, 1899 -1968
Work titled: ‘Waiting’, 1964, Tempera on Canvas
From the article titled ‘The Cut in Collage Pollock, Fontana, Matta-Clark, Ono’
by Matthew Ryan Smith, artUS, 22 Spring 2008
For me, this article represents its audiences how art works of these four artists can relate to the definition of ‘collage’. Collage is a popular technique of making art that created by adhering the flat elements, such as newspaper, photographs, and illustrations, to another flat suface, and it is normally a technical term used only for two dimensional art works. This article broadens my perspective of ‘collage’, a French word meaning ‘to paste’, especially from its example of Lucio Fontana’ s art works.
Fontana is a well known artist for his cutting the canvas. Different from other artists, Fontana uses a knife instead of a paintbrush to slash the canvas from top to bottom, so, in his works, audiences can see the tracks of his slicings in the middle of the picture planes distinctively. By using an example from Fontana’s art piece, this article also uncovers the historical procedures of collage and expands its idea by paying attention to the cutting process, which usually stays behind the established meanings of collage. Fontana’s works shows the idea of using cutting process in the method of editing and recontextualizing materials of collage. In addition, his cutting remains fundamentally time-based, expresses both elegantly and violently, and represents his spatial concepts as well.
In my view, this article reinterprets the definition of collage rooted from the natural and fundamental practice mentioned above. It is a reasonable and helpful article that can help its audiences to understand the possibilities of making collage in another dimension.
5 comments:
Quiet, but extremely violent. This was the first impression of Lucio Fontana’s painting. Compared to the prominent artist Marina Abramovic’s performance, which expresses the consideration of the spirit and the body in a way of self-torment, this painting has a strong impact without saying and showing it directly. I am not judging which artwork is better or less, but, it is fascinating that the viewer can still feel the artist’s movement and emotion at the moment of painting, without a real performance. I believe Lucio Fontana understands human’s perception very well and expressed it in a sensitive and a careful way.
Eun Jung, Thanks!
Bundith
Hi,classmate, I read your essay very interestingly because I think it taught me another thoughts and perspective to approach interpretation of artworks. I think Fontana might be like a physicist who explores the beginning and end of the Universe.
Some people might doubt the usefulness of his research, but it is necessary in a different dimension, I think. But, in real life, our time and material is limited, so we should decide which part we focus on. That might be why our direction is different. But, it is real pleasure to understand different perspective and why we are different. Your writing was clear and I could understand why this work is important in exploring "collage".
Thanks.
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