Joseph Nechvatal reviews Lucio Fontana: Rétrospective at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, on view through August 24, 2014.

Nechvatal writes: "With Fontana, painting may be made to represent the totality of the virtual span. Indeed Fontana’s theoretically-based penetrated paintings take a huge step in the direction of escaping the limits of narrow representation in the interests of a post-media consciousness. From Fontana on, even art that does not fully undermine the proscenium and window-like shape of painting, photography, video and the computer screen may stand in for the abstract, all-over, intemperate 360° bubble-vision of the virtual…. In this drift towards all-over anti-representationalism, Fontana’s art began a leaving the framing apparatus and of the tunnel vision that fixed a segment of the objective world at one end and the viewer at the other. What had enabled that narrow cone of vision to simulate the entire visual atmospheric field previously, was possible precisely with the enclosure of that framing cone (that tangent tunnel) but once that framing cone has dissolved through Fontanaesque spatial ideals, the narrow cone of representation is found to be wanting and dissolves into an orbit of surplus value. And a much more encompassing atmospheric scopic organization is conceived in its place."