Fontana and Gumby Beyond the Surface
At Galleria SECCI in Milan, an exhibition puts two artists in dialogue—distant in time and language yet united by a material, physical, and cosmological vision of the pictorial act.
Two artists separated by generations and geographies, yet bound by a radical vision of painting as a space to be traversed, not inhabited. In the exhibition A Material Dance, Lucio Fontana and Alteronce Gumby are brought into conversation by Dexter Wimberly through a curatorial path that does not seek stylistic overlap, but rather resonances in gestures that challenge the surface—turning matter into thought and light.
Fontana transformed postwar European painting with an act that remains revolutionary to this day: cutting the canvas. Not to destroy it, but to go beyond it. His Spatial Concepts are not wounds, but openings—silent invitations to look beyond the painting, toward a cosmic dimension where emptiness becomes an active presence.
Gumby, born in 1985 in the United States, works with diverse materials—glass, resin, iridescent pigments—but with a similar intention: to break the frontality of the image and transform it into an experience, an energetic field, a space to be inhabited with both gaze and body. His interest in astrophysics and interstellar imagery translates into works that seem to trap light, time, and movement within an apparently solid surface.
In their juxtaposition, something emerges that goes beyond the sum of their individual practices: a shared idea of painting as a physical, spiritual, and cosmological act. For both, process is an integral part of the work. Fontana works through subtraction; Gumby through accumulation. One cuts to open spaces for contemplation; the other constructs tactile landscapes that absorb and refract reflections. Yet both propose a painting that resists representation and asserts itself as a real, concrete, existential presence.
A Material Dance, a sibylline title, takes shape at Galleria SECCI in Milan from October 3 to December 20, opening to the public with a vernissage on October 2. The choice of Milan is no coincidence: it is the city where Fontana developed his spatial poetics and where Gumby’s work now finds a new interpretive framework.
In the exhibition, the works follow one another without hierarchy, creating a visual rhythm made of contrasts and affinities, silences and vibrations. A dance indeed—not between figures, but between materials, surfaces, and possibilities. The exhibition refocuses attention on the body of the artwork, on the density of matter, and on the urgency of making, restoring to painting the sense of an act of discovery: a mental space, a gesture of openness toward the infinite.
