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Lot Essay
Created in 1953, Sacco combustione juxtaposes myriad random elements in a way that hints at some internal, inherent order. An assemblage of scraps of textiles and materials, daubed with paint and tar, this is not truly abstract art but is in some manner the extension of the landscapes and still life paintings that Burri had been painting during the 1940s. Taking these objects and elements from the real world, filling them with contrasting colours and textures, Burri has made an intriguing, sensual patchwork image expressly linked to the reality from which the components were taken.
In his collages, Burri condensed the role of the artist as creator and destroyer, tearing and even burning the materials he selected, and then reassembling them, sometimes in a seemingly eclectic manner and yet always one in which, in retrospect, the viewer can ascertain a certain logic, a harmony. Sacco combustione combines many elements that would not formerly have been associated with 'art'. The loose-weave canvas, almost completely unpainted, appears to mock the art of painting. It is a direct jibe, a taunting travesty, challenging the traditional hierarchies of art and aesthetics. This is accentuated by the inclusion of gold leaf within the work, an echo of the techniques involved in so much of the great canon of Italian religious art. Burri is challenging the world around him, challenging its values, and creating a unique artwork that, more than the mere representation of a still life or landscape, condenses reality itself within the frame.
During the Second World War, Burri was interned in Texas as a prisoner of war, where he began to pursue art in earnest. This humble background, in an internment camp where he lived from hand to mouth, helped form his unique sense of aesthetics. It was there that the inherent nobility of such elements as hessian and tar became apparent to him. Released into war-torn Italy, the poverty of these materials were not a contrast to the world now around him, although they would have been if he had stayed in, say, the commercial luxury of the United States. Italy itself was crumbling and impoverished, and so the same elements that had marked Burri's internment featured as strongly in his liberty. His use of these materials was not so much a challenge to the consumer world, but instead a celebration of the little that was available. He took scraps, shards and patches and, phoenix-like, Art would appear from them, an effect later intensified in the Combustione works, where fire itself featured in his art. The contents of the present work are the very real detritus of his own life. The plaster-like areas of white resemble the crumbling walls of so many stuccoed Italian houses, while the canvas itself is reminiscent of sacks and sackcloth. The material in the centre of the piece appears to have been smeared and marked with oil and tar, the throwaway cloth of a poor mechanic being enshrined in his work. The canvas, and its contrast with the gold, the tar, the paint and other materials, creates a sensual array of materials jostling together, their differences and textures accentuated. Sacco combustione is a rich, existential tapestry redolent of the world around the artist.
As a constituent part, Burri favoured the canvas, in particular during this time, and made a rare comment on it which reveals both his interest in it as a 'real' object, and being of its own unique texture:
'Sacking, for example, is the compendium of the ideal psychological reasons, of the reasons of form and colour. I could obtain the same shade of brown, but it wouldn't be the same because it wouldn't contain everything I want it to contain... It must respond as a surface, as a material, and as an idea. In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint' (A. Burri in 1956, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan, 1999, p. 160).
Burri is here demonstrating his own attachment to the world itself. Why substitute, or represent, canvas when it can be hung on a wall in its own right? Burri took the concept of collage pioneered by Dada and the Cubists, but took it a level further, stitching matter to matter, abandoning the artifice of painting and representation. Indeed, in developing this technique, Burri encouraged his viewer to look at his art as a segment of reality and, conversely, to look at art as an object, a canvas, in its own right, regardless of the figurative daubs an artist may have imposed upon it.
The inclusion of essentially 'poor' materials in Burri's artworks formed an impressive contrast to some of the Post-War movements, which often favoured monochromes and sheer surfaces. Burri was more in line with the Informel movement, although only by association. However, his art would have a lasting effect on the development of the avant garde on the other side of the Atlantic, as is shown by the impact on Rauschenburg's art after his visits to Burri's studio. Burri's works embrace the unvarnished, unidealised view of the world, taking reality and chaos at face value. Despite the apparent order of the compartmentalised objects within Sacco combustione, despite the fact that an inherent logic seems to fuel the composition, there is a powerful sense, even on the level of the selection of the materials, that he has managed to stitch together a tiny corner of a chaotic world, to create a freeze-frame image of the pell-mell of the universe around us. This is the sense that led Emilio Villa to write in a catalogue of Burri's work published the year that Sacco combustione was created that 'For each of these paintings, always a bit unexpected, we can always say: this is a work that could only have been done today, this is an action that could only have been performed today, not yesterday and not tomorrow' (E. Villa, 1953, quoted in Serafini, op.cit., 1999, p. 141).
In his collages, Burri condensed the role of the artist as creator and destroyer, tearing and even burning the materials he selected, and then reassembling them, sometimes in a seemingly eclectic manner and yet always one in which, in retrospect, the viewer can ascertain a certain logic, a harmony. Sacco combustione combines many elements that would not formerly have been associated with 'art'. The loose-weave canvas, almost completely unpainted, appears to mock the art of painting. It is a direct jibe, a taunting travesty, challenging the traditional hierarchies of art and aesthetics. This is accentuated by the inclusion of gold leaf within the work, an echo of the techniques involved in so much of the great canon of Italian religious art. Burri is challenging the world around him, challenging its values, and creating a unique artwork that, more than the mere representation of a still life or landscape, condenses reality itself within the frame.
During the Second World War, Burri was interned in Texas as a prisoner of war, where he began to pursue art in earnest. This humble background, in an internment camp where he lived from hand to mouth, helped form his unique sense of aesthetics. It was there that the inherent nobility of such elements as hessian and tar became apparent to him. Released into war-torn Italy, the poverty of these materials were not a contrast to the world now around him, although they would have been if he had stayed in, say, the commercial luxury of the United States. Italy itself was crumbling and impoverished, and so the same elements that had marked Burri's internment featured as strongly in his liberty. His use of these materials was not so much a challenge to the consumer world, but instead a celebration of the little that was available. He took scraps, shards and patches and, phoenix-like, Art would appear from them, an effect later intensified in the Combustione works, where fire itself featured in his art. The contents of the present work are the very real detritus of his own life. The plaster-like areas of white resemble the crumbling walls of so many stuccoed Italian houses, while the canvas itself is reminiscent of sacks and sackcloth. The material in the centre of the piece appears to have been smeared and marked with oil and tar, the throwaway cloth of a poor mechanic being enshrined in his work. The canvas, and its contrast with the gold, the tar, the paint and other materials, creates a sensual array of materials jostling together, their differences and textures accentuated. Sacco combustione is a rich, existential tapestry redolent of the world around the artist.
As a constituent part, Burri favoured the canvas, in particular during this time, and made a rare comment on it which reveals both his interest in it as a 'real' object, and being of its own unique texture:
'Sacking, for example, is the compendium of the ideal psychological reasons, of the reasons of form and colour. I could obtain the same shade of brown, but it wouldn't be the same because it wouldn't contain everything I want it to contain... It must respond as a surface, as a material, and as an idea. In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint' (A. Burri in 1956, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan, 1999, p. 160).
Burri is here demonstrating his own attachment to the world itself. Why substitute, or represent, canvas when it can be hung on a wall in its own right? Burri took the concept of collage pioneered by Dada and the Cubists, but took it a level further, stitching matter to matter, abandoning the artifice of painting and representation. Indeed, in developing this technique, Burri encouraged his viewer to look at his art as a segment of reality and, conversely, to look at art as an object, a canvas, in its own right, regardless of the figurative daubs an artist may have imposed upon it.
The inclusion of essentially 'poor' materials in Burri's artworks formed an impressive contrast to some of the Post-War movements, which often favoured monochromes and sheer surfaces. Burri was more in line with the Informel movement, although only by association. However, his art would have a lasting effect on the development of the avant garde on the other side of the Atlantic, as is shown by the impact on Rauschenburg's art after his visits to Burri's studio. Burri's works embrace the unvarnished, unidealised view of the world, taking reality and chaos at face value. Despite the apparent order of the compartmentalised objects within Sacco combustione, despite the fact that an inherent logic seems to fuel the composition, there is a powerful sense, even on the level of the selection of the materials, that he has managed to stitch together a tiny corner of a chaotic world, to create a freeze-frame image of the pell-mell of the universe around us. This is the sense that led Emilio Villa to write in a catalogue of Burri's work published the year that Sacco combustione was created that 'For each of these paintings, always a bit unexpected, we can always say: this is a work that could only have been done today, this is an action that could only have been performed today, not yesterday and not tomorrow' (E. Villa, 1953, quoted in Serafini, op.cit., 1999, p. 141).