Fontana: L’origine du monde – Museo del Novecento, Italy

The investigation into the primordial forces that are at the origin of the manifestation of life on earth and in the cosmos and of artistic creation itself, are the thematic fulcrum of the Lucio Fontana exhibition. The origin of the world. 

The title evokes the famous and scandalous painting by Gustave Courbet and declines the epistemological meaning of that nineteenth-century painting towards an archetypal interpretation of Eros as a generating force of human life and the cosmos. Eros always poised between the high of the Platonic world and the low materialism of sexual bodily functions.

The exhibition intends to propose an unprecedented reflection on the work of Fontana, whose art appears to be not so much masculine, volcanic, demiurgic, as much critical literature has already supported, but allusive to the feminine generative force, which is active in the artist’s mind as in nature, in the cosmos and in the fertile body of the earth. New light can be thrown on his “cuts”, his “holes”, his graphic representations, often performed with a primary, infantile gesture, like an instinctual drive, even before being a project and reproduction.

The exhibition will bring together a series of drawings and small sculptures that will allow us to question the genesis of Spatial Environments, Spatial Concepts and Nature, and the prefigurations implicit in them. As is known, Lucio Fontana’s research takes place under the banner of a new experience and conception not only of space, but also of time, captured in a double dimension: towards the primordial past, that of the birth of the Earth, and towards the future of the Universe, that of its incalculable dimension. His research delves into the chthonic, original, telluric dimension of a newly generated matter, not in a religious but cosmological sense. A dimension that takes our imagination back to the beginnings of creation, of the Earth and the Moon, to whose conquest Fontana was sensitive, as if those masses of compact matter and full of energy, like meteors, or as if that set of perforations, in the shape of spirals and vortices, they were galaxies in formation. An exploration that embraces and brings together the micro and the macrocosm, the most organic, primary, nocturnal level of sexuality and the daytime level of conceptual imagination.

[Google Translate from original source: Italian]