To begin, Lucio Fontana was an Argentine Italian artist who moved between sculpture, painting and environments. In the late 1940s he set out a Spatialist approach that asked art to work with real space and real time rather than stay on a flat plane. That idea set the stage for his decision to pierce the canvas.
At heart, he pierced the canvas because he wanted actual depth, not the illusion of it. The canvas, for him, was a membrane that separated the viewer from space. By making a real opening he allowed air, light and shadow to enter the work. He was thinking with the optimism of the space age and the pull of the infinite, so the act reads less like damage and more like a proposal that painting could be open to the world.
From this idea came two families of works. The Buchi, or holes, are monochrome canvases punctured with sequences of small round openings. The Tagli, or slashes, are longer cuts made with a blade. Most carry the title Concetto spaziale, or spatial concept. The holes and slits change the canvas from a surface into an object that interacts with light. Shadows settle in the openings, and the eye is drawn into the space behind. In the Buchi the patterns can feel like constellations or musical phrases, while the Tagli read as measured, deliberate strokes.
In practice, he kept the process calm and exact. First, he stretched the canvas and laid down a ground with a single colour, often white, red, black or green, so nothing distracted from the action and the space it created. Next, he planned the rhythm, sometimes marking a loose guide for the Buchi to balance spacing and alignment. Then he made the openings. For the holes he worked from the front with an awl or nail, pressing cleanly to avoid tearing the weave. For the slashes he used a single, unbroken movement of the blade, then eased the cut open with his fingers to give it a precise contour. After that, he fixed black gauze to the back, both to protect the edges and to deepen the void so light fell into the opening rather than straight through. Finally, he kept the presentation simple, letting the space do the talking.
As a result, the works bring real depth into painting. Light and shadow shift as you move, so the experience is not a fixed image but an encounter. The gesture changes as well. It is no longer brush on surface but hand through surface, a quiet move that turns a picture into an opening.
It is easy to mistake the holes and slashes for an attack on painting, yet his writing and craft suggest care rather than conflict. The act respects the medium by extending it. The hole is not a wound. It is a way of looking through.
Looking ahead from his time, the idea travelled widely. Artists linked to ZERO, Nouveau Réalisme, Minimalism and installation art picked up the invitation to treat the picture plane as a site for real space, light and time. The clarity and restraint of his method helped that shift take root.
In short, Fontana pierced the canvas to move beyond illusion and bring the reality of space into art. The technique is simple in appearance and exact in execution, and it encourages us to see not only a surface, but what lies through it.
