LUCIO FONTANA

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Lucio Fontana, an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. Born in Italy to Argentina immigrant parents. His father is the famous sculptor Luigi Fontana. Lucio started as a sculptor working in his father studio in Buenos Aires Agentina and studied under the sculptor Adolfo Wildt.


After decade ot traveling through Italy and France, working with abstract and expressionist painters. He returned to Buenos Aires (1946), where he founded the Altamira academy , and made public the White Manifesto.


His most memorial work is paintings painted in matte, bright secondary colors or, most effectively, in warm whites, and inflicted with one or more slits, usually vertical. He would do the cuts while the paint was wet, then mold their shapes by hand when it was dry and apply black gauze behind the spaces to yield an impression of measureless depth. The slash are precisely placed, compositionally just right—which can’t have been easy to achieve.


He once told a reporter, “You have no idea how much stuff I throw away.”