According to the midcentury Italian painter Lucio Fontana, painting had no future because it wasn't architectural. The underlying problem, he believed, was flatness. Confined to two dimensions, and contained in a frame, painting was essentially passive.
Instead of conjuring false depth by painting in perspective, Fontana punctured and lacerated his canvases to reveal the spaces behind them. If paintings couldn't be inhabited, at least they could be sculpted.
Fontana's Buchi and Tagli are now justly famous, breakthrough artworks that are exhibited in museums worldwide. However Fontana also proposed another solution to painting's architectural problem, which is far less familiar yet arguably more significant.
Beginning in 1949, Fontana created a series of Ambienti Spaziale – spatial environments – in which painterly form and color completely surrounded the viewer. Because these rooms were temporary and seldom replicated, few have been seen since his death in 1968. An important exhibition at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan presents eleven of them, all expertly reconstructed in collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation.
Fontana's Ambienti emerged from an art movement he founded, which he called Spatialism and positioned as the antithesis of artistic tradition. He was especially determined to enlist technologies that painters had never used. (Several Ambienti incorporated fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light; others were built with dozens of neon tubes.)
These technologies allowed him to visually activate all three dimensions of his environments, and he added a fourth dimension by making them experiential: Visitors had to make their way through labyrinthine passages which were sometimes invested with tactile qualities such as cushioned or carpeted floors.
Some of Fontana's Ambienti now look quaint, much like the special effects in old movies. This is the risk of relying too heavily on novel technologies, which inevitably lose their magical qualities as we grow accustomed to them and are dazzled instead by whatever comes next.
Fontana's most successful environments are those that show greater restraint. He was especially effective with neon, which already had a long history in commercial signage, but which he deployed at the scale of architecture. To be inside these spaces is to become one with their colors. There is nothing passive about these environments, not even the viewer.
However the most significant impact of Spatialism has been the art that followed in its wake. Since the 1960s, when artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin began experimenting with light and space, Fontana's vision has become practically mainstream. Painting has not exactly been supplanted, but installation is no longer one man's fancy or even a mere movement.
The importance of Fontana's environments is signified by the fact that their influence has persisted even as they've vanished. Though few of us have seen the Ambienti before, they seem deeply familiar.
