In 1949, Lucio Fontana’s “painterly” work appeared from out of the blue, after his years of rigorous training and successful practice as a mason and sculptor for small private commissions in Italy and in Argentina. He declared the practice of painting dead at the very moment he assumed its burden, and he took on an identity as a painter, which he declared to be the most empty, obsolete, and irrelevant occupation after the war. This chapter explores Fontana’s violent gestures of slitting and puncturing the canvas as a response to abstract expressionism, which he referenced repeatedly in his publication Il...