With the piece Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’ Lucio Fontana claimed to have “created an infinite dimension.”

Fontana is good, but is he created-an-infinite-dimension good? If the infinite dimension is an artistic representation of a bajingo, then maybe. But then he would be competing with people like Georgia O’Keeffe and Judy Chicago and the discovery wouldn’t really be his, per se. Honestly, it seems as if these pieces were happened upon accidentally when Fontana just wanted to rip into something one day. However, as Philip Shaw writes for the Tate, "despite the obviously violent implications of his art, Fontana maintained that he had set out to construct rather than to destroy.” And indeed, the slashing of the canvas simultaneously destroys and creates. 

Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’ is just one piece in a large series that Fontana worked on from 1958-1968. Each and every one of the pieces in this body of work has one or multiple slashes in the canvas. The ones with one cut have the word “Attesa”, meaning expectation or hope on the back and the ones with multiple cuts have “Attese,” the plural version of “attesa.” After cutting, the canvases were backed with black fabric to give the appearance of an endless hole behind. These cuts, “tagli” in Italian, were the essence of the movement called Spazialismo (Spatialism) that Fontana started in 1947.

In his Manifesto Blanco, Fontana called for art that “embraced science and technology and made use of such things as neon light, radio and television.” This definition of the movement paired this artwork makes little to no sense though. Is it possible that Fontana made up the infinite dimension thing so that this series would fit into the science part of the manifesto, or is there something I’m missing? Either way, Fontana was pleased with his work. He said in an interview in 1968, “‘My discovery was the hole and that's it. I am happy to go to the grave after such a discovery.'”