Spazialismo

Spazialismo (Spatialism) was an Italian movement founded by the artist Lucio Fontana in 1947, whose manifesto proclaimed the need to unite art with the science and technology of a new era. Fontana, born in Argentina and working in Italy, sought to push painting beyond the flat plane of the canvas into real space and time. The most famous embodiment of these ideas is his series Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts), in which he punctured and slashed the surface of the canvas, transforming the two-dimensional picture into an object that admits real space and the darkness behind it. Spatialism anticipated environmental art, installation and light-based work, and influenced postwar experiments in kinetic and neon art. The radical gesture of breaking the surface became a universal symbol of the shift from the traditional easel picture to spatial thinking, a concern shared by contemporary artists, including in Ukraine.