OŽILJCI U PERMANENTNOM NASTAJANJU – RANA, PROSTOR I BIĆE U DELIMA LUČA FONTANE I PAOLA SKEĐIJA

Abstract

Lucio Fontana and Paolo Scheggi, pivotal figures in post-war Italian art, are connected by a seemingly analogous strategy that defines their respective practices: interventions which disrupt the traditional pictorial form throughcuts, openings, and a reconfiguration of spatial perception that transcends con- ventional two-dimensionality. Despite this superficial resemblance, their conceptual orientations and artistic outcomes differ fundamentally. Fontana’s inci-sions may be interpreted as existential wounds – gestures of interruption and transgression characterised by immediacy and spontaneous intensity. Scheggi’s perforations, conversely, convey an impression of deliberation, structural coher- ence, and precision, grounded in a logic of construction and phenomenological inquiry. A comparative reading of Fontana and Scheggi demonstrates that the cut or opening operates not solely as an emblem of innovation or an index of individual authorship. When understood as a wound – or, more precisely, as a scar in formation – it assumes a more complex ontological and affective role: that of a testimony to trauma inscribed within the work’s material and spatial logic. Fontana’s Cuts articulate a notion of the wound as revelation. The slashed and punctured canvas opens onto the void of infinity, producing a trace that is at once corporeal and transcendental. Scheggi’s Intersurfaces, in contrast, constitute interior voids – layered and relational fields that invite contemplative engagement and situate perception within a rhythmic dialogue of surfaces. For Fontana, artistic creation is an affirmation of vitality – a gesture of expansive and anarchic energy. Scheggi’s poetics, conversely, are underwritten by the consciousness of fragility and finitude. The scar thus emerges as a shared metaphor and structural bridge between the expressive violence of the elder artist and the meditative constructiveness of the younger. In both, the scars in perpetual formation articulate the dialectic between trauma and recovery, destruction and creation. It constitutes a spatial memory inscribed in matter – a site where the phenomenology of perception converges with the ontology of the wound. What emerges is not merely the trace of suffering but the persistence of being itself: fragile, regenerative, and infinitely open.