It seems that whenever I see a work by Lucio Fontana, I am able to precisely remember the place, the time and the mood I was in. The first occasion in which I saw an actually painting by Fontana, and not in reproduction, was at the Tate Gallery in London in the summer of 1965. That was quite a while ago. I was a kid; but I never forgot it. A year ago, while visiting Madrid during the ARCO art fair, I had another occasion to see a spectacular gold painting by Fontana, which was installed at the entrance to the Thyssen Museum across the Prado. It was the only painting in that museum that I liked. For the most part, the Thyssen is probably the most overrated museum in the world. Everything impressed me as second-rate – whether Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting, early Renaissance painting, or, especially, Modern painting. But this Fontana painting was delectable, superb, spiritual, authentic in its aura.

The current exhibition at Sperone Westwater is a mixture of Fontana's paintings with holes (buchi) and cuts (tagli). Most are done on, or, more accurately, through canvas, while others are done through copper and brass. These are exhilarating works of art, bound to the stratosphere of the highest order. In Fontana's marvelous Concetto Spaziale, we discover the lost epic of contemporary Modernism. It began in 1948 after the War. The Manifesto was signed by Fontana, Mileni Milani, and the philosopher Benjamin Joppolo, among others. Fontana was, in fact, born in Argentina and moved to Italy.

There is a sensuality about this work that is inexplicable, a heartening desire to open up the threshold of space, to ascend to new levels of cosmic reality within the mind, to offer a sense of the physical in relation to the intellect, in relation to the spiritual. Fontana's cuts and holes are as famous as Pollack's pours and drips, yet their intentions are widely different. Once emphasized the physical in terms of the mental, the other the mental in terms of the physical.

The consistency of Fontana's work is particularly alluring. The depth of feeling, the penetration of pictorial space is what becomes an astounding feature of the work. Each painting has an undeniably intuitive sense of resolution, a feeling of wholeness through negation. They are crafted and elegant. They are deftly understood as conceptual in intention, while, at the same time, fully entrenched in the traditions from which they attempt to dispel themselves.

Fontana is an anomaly of late Modernism. His work is a mystery that defies previously identified categories. His paintings have the signature of a child's mark, the cultural signifier of a heretic of art who, at the same time, refused to give up his polemical stance. Fontana knew what he wanted and he would not let go of the repetition of his desire. His focus was on the future of and through this focus, he relieved himself of self-importance and gained the quintessential humility that allows great art to happen. He could withstand the assault of titillating excess.

Fontana is an artist who signals the course of the early Twenty-first Century as Duchamp heralded the course for the second half of the Twentieth. Both artists knew the power of the relaxed gaze in relation to the action of the moment, the nearly non-action, of being on time at the right time, and enjoying the absorption of being there.

-Robert C. Morgan