In the instances where Fontana slashed an unpainted canvas, as in the present work, there is a particular affinity between the rawness of the surface and the primordial character of the gesture itself. Destruction and creation were bound together in these works. The same gesture that negated the canvas as a purely pictorial vehicle also opened up its sculptural possibilities. 'Art dies but is saved by gesture', Fontana wrote in 1948 (Lucio Fontana 1899-1968: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1977, p.19). Such rhetoric was characteristic of Spazialismo, the movement he founded in 1947 when he returned to Milan after spending the war years in Buenos Aires.