Io sono un santo, 1969

The cut-out figure of Lucio Fontana, applied to the centre of the large primed canvas, “presents” a small photographic canvas featuring the autograph words taken from one of the artist’s works (“Io sono un santo” [I am a Saint]).
In the artist’s own words: “In the month of May 1969, totally independent from the Church, I initiated the process of beatification of Lucio Fontana. The goal of the initiative is neither paradoxical nor polemic, nor does it intend to eradicate the very meaning for which it was undertaken. The life and works of Lucio Fontana are not the sole activities upholding this hypothesis. Proof of this, the only one up until now, is an image captured during that same period: Lucio Fontana appears in space (in the sky) in the act of handing us a canvas, which we remembered to have been abandoned in his studio like many others. Later, the apparition was meant to be turned into a statement (into a truth): the canvas still allows us to glimpse, even though it is placed at an infinite distance from us but perhaps for this very reason more legible, his autograph words ‘io sono un santo’”.1

1 G. Paolini in NAC Notiziario Arte Contemporanea 31 (Milan), 15 February 1970, p. 26.