Lucio Fontana
Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’, 1960, Canvas, 93 x 73 cm, Tate; Purchased 1964, T00694, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY
The Incisive Word
Commentary by Deborah Lewer
Rightly explaining the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)
The second letter to Timothy is profoundly concerned with the importance of truth (2:14–26). The ‘workers’ in this new movement are called to present themselves to God, unashamed, and ‘rightly explaining the word of truth’ (2:15). ‘Rightly explaining’ here is a translation of a seldom-used Greek term orthotomounta. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament. A literal translation is ‘to cut straight’ (Towner 2006: 521). The King James Version has it as ‘rightly dividing’ (2:15, KJV).
The letter uses the embodied image of a cutting action to specify the abstract concept of truthful explanation. This kind of physical and conceptual gesture finds an echo in the sustained practice of the influential Italian painter and sculptor of postwar modernity, Lucio Fontana.
Fontana titled most of his works with the conjoined terms ‘spatial concept’ (concetto spaziale) and ‘waiting’, or ‘expectations’ (attese). 1960 was the year that marked the beginning of what would become his regular practice of making large monochrome canvases and cutting into them. It was an approach he continued until his death in 1968. These austere works bear a mark of a kind of irrevocable violence, a wound done to the body of the canvas. There are distant echoes of the tearing of the temple curtain (Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45).
For all this, they have a peculiarly still, clean, and graceful beauty. This work does not derive from an iconoclastic whim. A photograph from 1966, taken by Ugo Mulas, shows Fontana ‘opening the canvas with a cut’ (Storck 1994: 51). The artist intuits that the cut prefigures a beginning, a way through to new possibility beyond the surface. In the last interview he gave before his death in 1968, Fontana said: ‘I did not cut holes [in canvases] to ruin the image. On the contrary: I made holes in order to find something else.’ (Storck 1994). In the case of the letter to Timothy, the cutting is of the ‘word of truth’, the unchained word of God (2:9) for the sake of which Paul and others endure.
References
Storck, Gerhard. 1994. ‘Im weissen Raum’, in Im weissen Raum. Lucio Fontana. Yves Klein (Krefeld: Museen Haus Esters und Haus Lange), pp. 7–57 [56–57]
Towner, Philip H. 2006. The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)
