Art: Outside Is Everything

How should a modern artist react to the atomic age? In Venice last week, 13 Italian painters who call themselves “spatialists” and “nuclearists” gave their answer with an exhibit “inspired by the atomic bomb.” The canvases were almost as explosive as the bomb itself: furious fireballs of bright colors and bold contrasts. Prizewinning explosion: a churning blue and green fantasy by a 27-year-old artist named Gianni Dova. At the top of his painting was a dripping black splash with a fiery red spot. The impression he hopes to give, says Dova, is that the splash is alive, and will “continue to . . . grow until it overwhelms everything.”

Spatialist Dova frets at the old idea that a painting is something to be enclosed by a frame: “I want to conclude my ideas outside the frame, to give the sensation that outside is everything.”

Lucio Fontana, 53, who founded the spatialist school in Buenos Aires six years ago, also submitted a display. It was a spinning, nebular mass perforated with hundreds of tiny holes and lighted from the back. “We conceive of art,” says Head Spatialist Fontana, “as the sum of physical elements—color, sound, movement, time, space—forming a physical, psychic unity . . . an art which must be communicated through new techniques and mediums.” He foresees a day when vibrating images and even smoke will be televised as art. “For me,” he says, “painting within a frame is dead, and sculpture as we know it is dead.”

The reactions of Venice’s art lovers ranged all the way from bewilderment to outright anger. “Art is a religion,” growled 85-year-old Giuseppe Cherubim, dean of Venetian painters. “If it were up to me, I would do as Christ did when he kicked the profaners out of the temple. These paintings are made with water and idle talk.” But idle or not, spatialism was the talk of Venice. During the first week, 4.000 crushed in for a look at the atomic fireballs and glowing pinholes.