The cuts in the canvas manage to break with two-dimensionality
Spatialism is an artistic movement that emerged in the mid- 1940s in Italy. Lucio Fontana was responsible for promoting this movement that combined postulates of Tachism and Dadaism , among other groups.
A peculiar depth
The publication of Fontana 's “White Manifesto” in 1946 is indicated as the starting point of spatialism. This text appeared in the city of Buenos Aires , where this Italian-Argentine painter and sculptor lived at the time. The following year, in Milan , the movement had its formal birth, gained momentum and began to position itself in the artistic panorama of Italy and the rest of the European continent.
One of the main characteristics of spatialism is the use of sharp or pointed elements to tear and tear the canvases . In this way, its exponents created a three-dimensional effect in their works .
With these instruments, and sometimes appealing to the incorporation of various objects to establish reliefs , they gave their paintings a depth impossible to achieve with brushes . This physical discontinuity of the paintings is one of the pillars of spatialism.
The key is in discontinuity
By letting go of what he considered aesthetic artifices, Fontana set out to examine the spatial uses of painting. With his discontinuous canvases, the artist eliminated the distance between the painting and the space that surrounded it, modifying the context.
Spatialism, in short, oscillates between two great techniques . On the one hand, it resorts to a destructive methodology since it holes, tears and cuts the canvases; On the other hand, it builds new surfaces by inserting fabrics, wood, nails and other elements. Thus it establishes different spatial effects .
In summary, the Italian artist understood that through the use of the brush he could not escape the dimensional restriction that characterizes this type of art, where the material depth does not exceed a few millimeters if only layers of paint overlap. For this reason, he devised different ways to compose his works on the real level, without barriers.
Related movements
As mentioned above, spatialism was inspired by other movements, among which Dadaism , Tachism and concrete art can be noted. We can say about Dadaism that it was created with the objective of going against the arts. Its public presentation took place in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in the city of Zurich.
The poet Hugo Ball was the one who proposed this movement, and in fact the first Dadaist writings are attributed to him. However, its greatest exponent was Tristan Tzara , a Romanian writer who participated in the founding of Dadaism some time later. One of the fundamental features of this movement is that it opposes the vision that positivism established of reason . Furthermore, he rebelled against the conventions of the world of letters and the plastic arts, he laughed at the bourgeois artist and his creations.
For Fontana, the brush is not the most important instrument
Regarding tachism , it emerged in France in the 1940s and is part of informalism . It was a response to cubism and among its most characteristic features are the spontaneous brush strokes, the drops and stains of paint made from the tube and the illegible strokes that evoke calligraphy. When the Second World War ended, generally speaking of the School of Paris was synonymous with tachism .
Finally we have concrete art , also called concretism . It belongs to abstract painting and its development took place during the 1930s, based on the manifesto written by the Dutch painter and poet Theo van Doesburg . The objective of tachism was to free oneself from the symbolic associations between art and reality, and was based on the fact that colors and lines did not need anything else to be concrete.