Documenting Light: Kosice, Fontana, and Transnational Luminous Environments

This article examines the emergence of luminous environments in mid-twentieth-century art through the intertwined histories of Gyula Kosice, Lucio Fontana, and the transnational networks that later formed New Tendencies. Rejecting a linear genealogy from European modernism to Latin America, it argues for Buenos Aires as a generative node where artificial illumination, experimental publishing, and photographic mediation shaped new models of perceptual and spatial experience. Drawing on catalogues, photomontages, manifestos, installation photography, exhibition reviews, and digital archives, the article treats documentation as a constitutive medium that shaped how ephemeral luminous works were produced, circulated, and historicized. Kosice’s neon structures, hydrospatial proposals, and early Madí publications are contextualized within the electrified urban landscape and experimental print culture of midcentury Buenos Aires. Fontana’s Spatialism is reinterpreted through his Argentine connections, emphasizing how debates on invention, perception, and technological modernity informed his environmental experiments with neon and ultraviolet light.