Lot 614 D

„I am a sculptor and not a ceramist. I have never turned a plate on a potter's wheel or painted a vase. Lace and nuance annoy me. […] During my long stay at the Sèvres laboratories I researched and studied form, the expression of form. As in my studio, I continued to sculpt figures and metamorphoses weighing hundreds of pounds, and to paint them in bright colours. My plastic form from the earliest to the latest models is never dissociated from colour. My sculptures have always been polychrome. I coloured the plasters, I coloured the terracottas.
Colour and form are indissoluble, born of exactly the same need. Polychromy has had illustrious precedents in every age: Egyptians, Greek, Etruscans, Assyrians, from cave paintings to Renaissance sculpture. I made my first ceramic sculpture in Argentina in 1926: the “Charleston Dancer” purchased by the Modern Art Gallery in Rosario de Santa Fé. It was only in 1936, at the Mazzotti factory in Albisola, that I began a real activity in this field with around fifty pieces: algae, butterflies, flowers, crocodiles, lobsters, a whole petrified and shining aquarium. The material was attractive: I could mould a sea-bed a statue a lock of hair and give them a compact, virgin colour that the fire amalgamated. The fire was a sort of intermediary: it perpetuated the form and the colour. After the aquarium and the mineral flowers I made busts, masks, metamorphoses; my women with their golden faces were seen in galleries all over Italy. People spoke of primordial ceramics. The material was shattered but firm.
The critics said ceramic. I said sculpture. The plastic score was enriched with botanical and marine motifs but the form followed the course and the oscillations of those rhythms that were forming inside me with a rapidity that did not admit of delay. And when I moved to Albisola to the Sèvres factories and I made more shells and rocks and polyps and figures and strange animals that have never existed, my sculptural research continued without flattery; royal enamels bored me; I took a Minotaur into the laboratories that had served the tables of all the Louis of France, a Minotaur on a lead that butted the porcelain baskets and the biscuit allegories with its horns. I shouldn't have said that. These are things we should leave for other people to say. Next time, perhaps, I will be more modest.” (Lucio Fontana 1939, in: Enrico Crispolti und Rosella Siligato (Hg.), Lucio Fontana, Ausst.Kat. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rom 1998, S. 54-55)