Lucio Fontana

With the physique of a boxer and a spirit constantly in turmoil, Lucio Fontana ‘cannot sit still’: shaped by his experiences of the Great War and the two years he spent as a gaucho in the Pampas, he is engaged in a fight to the death on all fronts, even ‘against hunger’, as he himself would write to his father. His father would like his son to return home to Rosario, where a secure, if perhaps uninspiring, family business awaits him; but Lucio, in Milan with no commissions and no money for his studio rent, refuses to give in. It is this life torn between two worlds, Italy and Argentina, and between two ways of conceiving art, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that forces him into constant sacrifice and drives him to rebel, first against his bourgeois and traditionalist family heritage, then against the academic world and an art system hostile to any innovation; all in the name of Abstract Art – but a personal form of abstraction characterised by purity and freedom. From the inspired ‘intuitions’ of a sculptor and ceramist in Milan, Albisola, Paris and Buenos Aires, his tenacity led him to draft the Blanco Manifesto and to become not only the leader of the Spatialist movement, but also a point of reference for a new generation of artists.
Paolo Campiglio attempts to unveil the man behind the infamous ‘cuts’, with his daily doubts and struggles, whilst also exploring lesser-known aspects of Fontana’s life: his relationship with his two mothers; his boundless generosity towards the younger colleagues he loved to surround himself with; and his relationship with the love of his life, Teresita Rasini, who would wait for him even when he was believed to be dead. What emerges from these pages is a combative figure, resistant to compromise, yet shining with an innate charm and an overwhelming sense of humour—qualities that led the critic Raffaele Carrieri to remark: ‘In everything he does, the intensity exceeds the normal level’.