Concetto spaziale, Teatrino (1), 1965

Fontana is one of those artists whose wealth of ideas are channeled into an all-encompassing creative impulse that art history, perhaps overly dependent on schematism, transforms into a dialectic, or even a split, between different expressions, failing to recognize them as the development of an organic path. These expressions, while diverse, nonetheless result from the powerful unified nature of a single impetus that reverberates in multiple types of forms, ranging from the artist’s abstract research in the 1930s to his ceramic production, often defined as baroque or rocaille, to works of unusual imaginative freedom that emerge from his spatialist poetics. [...]