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"Burri transforms rags into a metaphor for bleeding human flesh, breathes fresh life into the inanimate materials which he employs, making them live and bleed; then heals the wounds with the same evocative ability and the same sensibility with which he first inflicted them."
A deep and cavernous black void punctuates the molten layers of scorched and searing red plastic in Alberto Burri’s enthralling work, Rosso Plastica. Hovering tenuously between the realms of creation and destruction, the piece encapsulates the Italian artist’s radical investigations into the alchemical potential of fire in painting. Executed in 1963, the work embodies a prodigious example of Burri’s most celebrated and important series, the Plastiche, which he initiated in 1960.
In Burri’s hands, liquid craters and draping folds of scorched man-made matter breathe new organic life: inanimate and ubiquitous substance is thus propelled to the elevated status of a work of art. Having pioneered an artistic inquiry in celebration of the quotidian substances of modern living, Burri was an extremely influential figure in the ensuing Arte Povera movement in Italy during the late 1960s. In elevating everyday materials to the status of high art, artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Piero Manzoni, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Enrico Castellani sought to break down the dichotomy between art and life – a driving force prophetically central within Burri’s early 1950s production. Nonetheless where these divergent artists would privilege political motives or Pop art strategies, Burri was concerned primarily with the material reality of the picture plane. By utilising unassuming lengths of wood, cuts of industrial iron, and sheets of plastic, Burri looked to regenerate and substantiate an expression of the real, the physical, and the tangible, beyond mere mimesis. In this sense, Burri’s use of fire and refutation of traditional art-making practices chimes with the work of his post-war contemporaries.
“The laceration, the tearing, the stitching, the excavation and inflation of the canvas mark that key moment in which the artist assumes the risk of positioning himself at the limits of the surface.”
I n Alberto Burri’s Sacco E (1958), medium, colour, content and form entwine across a textured and tactile surface. Rendered in fabric, burlap and acrylic on canvas, the work exemplifies the Italian artist’s innovative pictorial praxis: namely, to champion everyday materials and elevate them to the status of high art. Striking in its compositional and monochromatic simplicity, Sacco E is a rare and spectacular work from Burri’s celebrated body of Sacchi. Subversively employing matter as the subject for this pioneering series, Burri looked to the limitless potential of materiality as a vehicle for artistic expression. Revered for their revolutionary use of burlap sacking, the Sacchi defy easy categorisation: neither painting nor sculpture, these captivating works are punctuated with frayed and jagged stitching and suffused with a sense of desolation and destruction befitting of the Italian post-war mood. Housed in some of the world’s most eminent international collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, to name but a few, the Sacchi constitute the most profound expression of Burri’s consummate practice.
In Sacco E, passages of deep, charcoal black coalesce with the coarse ochre of natural burlap. The defining feature of Burri’s Sacchi, this material was imbued with tremendous symbolic importance for the artist, and the present work’s rough tactile beauty arises from a profound conceptual impetus. Ubiquitous during the Second World War, burlap was utilised for tents, supply sacks, and sandbags, and even woven in strips through camouflage netting. Evocative, therefore, of the turmoil of this historic moment, it became the medium through which Burri was able to comprehend and overcome the horrifying trauma that still dominated the European collective memory in the 1950s. Cathartically repurposing elements of ragged, cast-off burlap sacking in his works, Burri highlights its “visual, tactile and symbolic power” (Emily Braun cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, 2016, p. 157). In so doing, the artist radically elevates his materials from mere medium to subject matter, from content to context. A key proponent of the ensuing Arte Povera movement that would take Italy by storm in the late 1960s, Burri boldly relinquished traditional mediums, opting instead to experiment with everyday materials that spoke more pertinently to the modern world he lived in: in place of canvas and paint, burlap, wood, fire, plastic and metal would become the predominant instruments of his labour. Indeed, with its coarse textured surface and asymmetrical composition, the present work poignantly foreshadows the fundamental precepts of Arte Povera.
"Precarious equilibrium and masterful control of the unpredictable were, in Burri’s opinion, the foundations of his painting.”
W ith its monumental scale and monochromatic simplicity, Alberto Burri’s Nero Cellotex exemplifies the Italian artist’s scrutiny of the traditional rules of painting. The work belongs to Burri’s eminent last series, the Cellotex, a large body of works created between 1986 and 1987, less than a decade before his death in 1995. With examples of the series housed in major museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Nero Cellotex subversively positions matter and medium as the subject of painting to radically explore the limitless potential of materiality as a vehicle for artistic expression.
The industrial boards used for the Cellotex series were composed from compressed sawdust and glue – simple and durable materials which Burri then manipulated through a pioneering process of cutting, shaping, gauging, scratching and burning. The carbon black forms of Nero Cellotex utilise classical and balanced compositional elements, wherein the matte base upholds a second layer of varnished geometrical shapes that stretch horizontally across the board. Consolidating the crisp, sharp edges and the smooth fluidity of the conjoined elements, the black surface has been heavily and consciously wrought by the artist in direct opposition to the Combustione, which relied fortuitously on elemental reactions and counterreactions. Stripped to its bare essence, the overall format of the present work is both refined, nuanced and raw. Evoking the coarse tactility of the natural burlap used in the artist’s earliest and ground-breaking Sacchi, the work’s compositional elements have been cut, pulled and sculpted to create a lyrical band of textured black-on-black shapes.
