FINE ART CATALOGUE

A book conceived as a spatial object, translating Lucio Fontana’s Teatrini into the language of book design.

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Designed for Nahmad Projects to accompany their exhibition of Lucio Fontana’s Teatrini, the book takes its structure from the works themselves. Made in the mid-1960s, the Teatrini frame punctured monochrome canvases within shaped, lacquered wooden surrounds. Neither painting nor sculpture, they operate somewhere between object, portal, and stage. Fontana considered them the culmination of his Concetti Spaziali – works intended to affect the viewer’s perception of space, both within the work and beyond. The Teatrini also bear witness to the world around the artist. Made during the early years of space exploration, they include playful allusions to the first spacewalk in 1965 – with sequences of punctures drifting across the canvas like footsteps in the sky.

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The cover is conceived as a sculptural interpretation of a Teatrino – using paper, foil blocking and blind debossing to create depth and texture, with black edge painting to echo the lacquered frames of the original works. This produces an object that feels total – deliberate, slightly surreal, and as if it might have dropped out of the vortex of space. Inside, the design is stripped back and composed with restraint. Typography is cool and functional, resisting expression. Negative space operates structurally, controlling rhythm and visual pacing. Fontana’s Buchi – his puncture marks – appear throughout as a recurring graphic motif: not literal holes, but printed absences that move across the book as a kind of graphic choreography.

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The image sequence is designed to be experienced rather than scanned – using scale, repetition, and silence to shape the reading. Installation views, archival material, and detail photographs are treated not as documentation but as spatial events. This is not a book about the Teatrini. It is a response to their logic – material, spatial, and precise. You can view the exhibition identity in detail here.

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Artist: Lucio Fontana

Gallery: Nahmad Projects

Design & Art Direction: Billie Temple