LUCIO FONTANA’S VENICE: AT THE EDGE OF THE INFINITE

More than a mere city, Venice has always been a cipher of dreams, a machine for the imagination. In every era, its beauty — and its improbability — have captivated visitors, and artists most of all. Countless painters have portrayed Venetian waterways and skies — Canaletto, J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet — though water and sky are hardly Venice’s alone. Yet in La Serenissima, the ordinary order of a city is transformed: canals, boats, and grand palazzi take the place of streets, traffic, and the prosaic architecture of elsewhere. And in that impossible water-bound city is a proposition: that the familiar world can be reimagined, and something more beautiful, magical, and original created in its place.

This is what artists have understood about Venice for centuries. In its shimmering light and watery reflections lies the possibility of another world: the elements transfigured into fantasy, the improbable made real, a connection to our own limitless nature. Venice is the infinite, shaped by human hands. Perhaps no artist understood this as profoundly as Lucio Fontana, who, unlike Canaletto and generations of artists before him, never sought to capture the city’s appearance. For Fontana, Venice was not a landscape, but the embodiment of the possible.

A pioneer of postwar abstraction, the Argentine-born Fontana made his career in Italy as a leader among radical artists and the founder of Spazialismo, or Spatialism, a movement that departed from the traditions of painting and sculpture through its engagement with space, light, and motion. Its principles had first taken shape in the Manifiesto Blanco, written with a group of students in Buenos Aires in 1946. “We intend to free art from matter, to free the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal,” the manifesto stated. Beginning with his Buchi (Holes) in 1949, Fontana put those ideas into practice, puncturing the canvas to break open its two-dimensional plane and incorporate the space beyond.

As Fontana continued to develop Spatialism in Italy over the next two decades, Venice became a recurring presence in his life and work. He had first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1930 and returned repeatedly over the course of his career, including in 1958, when an entire room was devoted to his recent work. Venice also began to find its way into his artistic language during those years.

The Pietre (Stones, 1951–58) paintings first crystallized Fontana’s remarkable way of conjuring the city: through the mesmerizing movement of its light and the impact of its astonishing beauty. To the canvas, he affixed fragments of glass from Murano, the Venetian island whose glassmakers had guarded their techniques for centuries — their craft itself a symbol of Venice’s mystique. Irregular as river stones and protruding from the surface, the glass catches light and throws back reflections, the work constantly shifting as the viewer moves. Their richness of color and sparkle recall the Byzantine mosaics of San Marco. His reading of the city was as radical as Turner’s world of light or Monet’s studies of its fleeting effects on the canals. But in the Pietre, Fontana went beyond depicting those effects: he made Venice’s infinite light part of the work itself. 

Then, in 1961, Fontana made Venice his explicit subject in a series of 22 canvases painted over the course of just a few months. Presented that year at Palazzo Grassi in Arte e Contemplazione, the works would come to be known as the Venezie. In the series, Fontana gave himself over to the sensuality of the city while maintaining his purified language of abstraction. The result was a radical new romanticism in his work.

Look at Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita (Spatial concept, In Piazza San Marco by night with Teresita, 1961), for example. It’s easy to imagine Fontana, habitually formal in suit and tie, walking through San Marco with his wife Teresita, in love with her and with the city. But none of that appears here. Instead, an agglomeration of holes forms concentric rectangles, while jewel-toned fragments of glass embedded in thick acrylic paint catch and reflect the light. This is the experience, rather than the illustration, of Venice: an anti-landscape composed of voids contrasted with dense impasto and luminous color. There is no architecture; there are no canals — just the essence of Venice abstracted.

Across the large-scale canvases, whose lyrical titles sit alongside Fontana’s austere Concetto spaziale designations, Fontana worked densely layered surfaces with his fingers and spatulas, puncturing the paint and embedding it with shards of glass and other materials. The surfaces spiral like Baroque church curlicues or radiate like moonlight and starlight — like the canals twinkling at night. The paintings’ unexpected exuberance startled audiences, but the series was quickly recognized as an expansion of Fontana’s artistic language. Later that year, the Venezie traveled to New York’s Martha Jackson Gallery, forming Fontana’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Just a few years later, Fontana found acclaim again in Venice when he was awarded the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 1966 Biennale. By the time of his death in 1968, his explorations with Spatialism had transformed the possibilities of space, matter, and light. Yet in the Pietre and Venezie, those experiments also became something more intimate: an encounter with a city whose swirling color, opulence, and immeasurable elements seemed uniquely suited to Fontana’s vision of the infinite. They are his eternal postcards from Venice, though they contain no conventional view of the city — only its light, material richness, and infinite space. No message need be written on them. In their abstraction, in their visual magic, the message is clear: artists are ciphers of dreams; they are imagination machines.

Fontana understood what artists had understood about the city for centuries. Venice is an invitation to create what we dare to dream up, as wild and fantastical as a city floating on water.