PARIS.- Galerie Karsten Greve is presenting Ceramics, an exhibition on the ceramic works of avant gardist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968). A master of abstraction, known internationally for his slashed canvases, or Tagli, it was, nevertheless, ceramics to which he devoted most of his time and art, deeply reinventing the medium throughout his career. This exhibition shines the spotlight on the diversity of his creations through works that are either emblematic or long unknown to the public. In this selection of sculptures crafted between 1936 and the end of the 1950s, the viewer can thus entertain correlations between the avant garde and biomorphic, abstract and figurative ceramics, with their profane and religious subjects.

In 1930 in Milan, Fontana distanced himself from classical sculpture and marble carving and gave his preference to modelling to shape more intuitive, expressive artworks. His first reliefs and sculptures in terracotta, plaster or ceramic were portraits and naked bodies in the ‘primitive’ figurative style. Figures with an organic, pure appearance heralded the artworks that would characterise the mid 1930s, representing marine animals and depths caught in a rocky magma.

One decade later, Fontana asserted his connection with ceramic in his first manifesto, Manifiesto blanco (“White Manifesto”), which laid the foundations for Spatialism. The malleability of ceramic embodied the principles he embraced in creating a new art that “drew its components from nature”: “Existence, nature and matter form a perfect unity. They develop in time and space. Change is an essential feature of existence. Movement and the capacity to evolve and develop are the fundamental properties of matter. It exists in movement and in no other way.” --Manifiesto blanco, 1946




For Fontana, clay represented a matter open to momentum and change. Enthused by the scientific innovations of his century and influenced by the Futurist movement, through ceramic, the sculptor seized an antique tradition and fused past and present. His works are voluntarily anachronistic. Fontana borrowed from a traditional repertoire and the forms of sacred art, but then associated them with his Spatialist reflections on the infinite.

The range of sculptures entitled “Battle”, “Crucifixion” and “Madonna and Child” reflect this desire, while the shifting effects of the matter create metamorphic recreations and resemble evolving bodies. Fontana’s preoccupation with the divine was linked to the societal stakes of the period and the conquest of space that so fascinated him. While the theme of religion spanned his work, the artist would declare at the end of his life that it was unthinkable to believe in gods on Earth: “religions must hold themselves to the current of scientific discoveries […] Man goes into space and sees that there is no Paradise”. This desire for expansion applies to Fontana’s sculptures, which transcend the confines of representation. The Christs and characters from the Commedia dell’arte are thus buried in the folds of matter. The twisting movements of the clay create an excess that reveals a baroque spatiality.

The sensuality of gesture emerges in another facet of Fontana’s work, his Buchi (“Holes”), in which the sculptor stabbed and cut through the smooth surface of the clay. “These holes were my ideas” explained Fontana, who varied his countless perforations, forming spirals and constellations. The surfaces of the Buchi refer to the atomic aspect of matter. Likewise, in 1959, with his Natura, imposing terracottas with spherical forms into which he cut or drilled, Fontana was directly in tune with current events and drew inspiration from the first images of craters on the moon. The ambiguous nature of these works, organic or handcrafted, echoed the artist’s passion for the very first gestures. Paving the way for Spatialist art, he invoked the gestures of our prehistoric ancestors, who, “pushed by the suggestive power of rhythm, […] had to dance until inebriated. Everything was sensation for primitive peoples. Sensations in relation to an unknown nature, musical sensations, rhythmic sensations”. This led him to conclude, in his manifesto: “Our action is to develop this original condition of humankind”.

Between a desire to go back to the source and the impetuousness of gesture, Fontana’s works are thus imbued with the same sensorial exultation at animating, breaking and piercing matter.