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Lot Essay
‘Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting. It is an irreducible presence that refuses to be converted into any other form of expression. It is a presence both imminent and active. This is what it stands for: to exist so as to signify and to exist so as to paint. My painting is a reality which is part of myself, a reality that I cannot reveal in words. It would be easier for me to say what does not need to be painted, what does not pertain to painting, what I exclude from my work sometimes with deliberate violence, sometimes with satisfaction... I can only say this: painting for me is a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilantly guarded so as to draw from it the power to paint more.’ – Alberto Burri
‘Burri pushed the exploration of matter... to a fundamental transformation: rejecting pictorial metaphors, he turned instead to brute material, to objects ravaged by time and discarded as waste, to sacks, rags, old shirts, tin-can tops scrap metal.’ – Maurizio Calvesi
‘The oxyhydrogen flame became a creative tool analogous to the painter’s brush or spatula, or the sculptor’s chisel. Aggressive and difficult to control, it was nevertheless able to be modulated in terms of its intensity. Fire consumes, burns, scalds and injures. Burri, however, transformed it into the protagonist of creative acts.’ – Massimo Duranti
Alberto Burri’s Combustione Plastica (Plastic Combustion), 1957, is a striking and enthralling example from the artist’s Combustion series. Overlapping within a concentrated black expanse are strips of scorched white, rough like a tree’s bark, and a single streak of striking vermillion. Burri burnt and scarred the surface of Combustione Plastca, resulting in viscerally tactile clusters of lesions,
sleek ruches and curling, charred edges, an accumulation of materials which exposes a choreography of texture. As Emily Bruan, the curator of Burri’s 2015 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, succinctly summarized: ‘Burri made medium, not form, the content of his pictures’ (E. Braun, The Red and the Black’, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2015, p. 61). Essential to Burri’s Combustions, however, is that combustion refers not to the fire itself, but rather to the material process of burning, a material metamorphosis. Combustion, accordingly, is more suggestive of transfiguration than any actual agent of change. Combustione Plastica calls attention to fire’s alchemical properties, both as creator and destroyer, a central focus for Burri: ‘For a long time I have wanted to explore how fire consumes, to understand the nature of combustion, and how everything lives or dies in combustion, to form a perfect unity’ (A. Burri quoted in G. Cenza, ‘Il petrolio
sotto le colline’, Civiltà delle Macchine 3, no. 6, November-December 1955, p. 50). Constructed largely by chance, Combustione Plastica is an articulation of material possibility, simultaneously brittle, robust, and vulnerable, in which fire itself is the protagonist. The artistic landscape of Burri’s childhood home in Cittá di Castello, in northern Italy, would prove to be immensely influential on his subsequent practice. His severely limited colour palette of red, black and white reflects the tones most often used in the Trecento and Quattrocento altarpieces he had known since childhood. Burri’s use of colour recalls the bodily drama of these Renaissance works and seems to ‘turn the body out’ (E. Braun, ‘The Red and the Black’, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2015, p. 67). Invoking fre’s potency to both maim and remake, Burri’s practice embraces radical transformation. The dynamic surface of Combustione Plastica is a meditation on the internal, a self-defined and autonomous world made new.
‘Burri pushed the exploration of matter... to a fundamental transformation: rejecting pictorial metaphors, he turned instead to brute material, to objects ravaged by time and discarded as waste, to sacks, rags, old shirts, tin-can tops scrap metal.’ – Maurizio Calvesi
‘The oxyhydrogen flame became a creative tool analogous to the painter’s brush or spatula, or the sculptor’s chisel. Aggressive and difficult to control, it was nevertheless able to be modulated in terms of its intensity. Fire consumes, burns, scalds and injures. Burri, however, transformed it into the protagonist of creative acts.’ – Massimo Duranti
Alberto Burri’s Combustione Plastica (Plastic Combustion), 1957, is a striking and enthralling example from the artist’s Combustion series. Overlapping within a concentrated black expanse are strips of scorched white, rough like a tree’s bark, and a single streak of striking vermillion. Burri burnt and scarred the surface of Combustione Plastca, resulting in viscerally tactile clusters of lesions,
sleek ruches and curling, charred edges, an accumulation of materials which exposes a choreography of texture. As Emily Bruan, the curator of Burri’s 2015 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, succinctly summarized: ‘Burri made medium, not form, the content of his pictures’ (E. Braun, The Red and the Black’, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2015, p. 61). Essential to Burri’s Combustions, however, is that combustion refers not to the fire itself, but rather to the material process of burning, a material metamorphosis. Combustion, accordingly, is more suggestive of transfiguration than any actual agent of change. Combustione Plastica calls attention to fire’s alchemical properties, both as creator and destroyer, a central focus for Burri: ‘For a long time I have wanted to explore how fire consumes, to understand the nature of combustion, and how everything lives or dies in combustion, to form a perfect unity’ (A. Burri quoted in G. Cenza, ‘Il petrolio
sotto le colline’, Civiltà delle Macchine 3, no. 6, November-December 1955, p. 50). Constructed largely by chance, Combustione Plastica is an articulation of material possibility, simultaneously brittle, robust, and vulnerable, in which fire itself is the protagonist. The artistic landscape of Burri’s childhood home in Cittá di Castello, in northern Italy, would prove to be immensely influential on his subsequent practice. His severely limited colour palette of red, black and white reflects the tones most often used in the Trecento and Quattrocento altarpieces he had known since childhood. Burri’s use of colour recalls the bodily drama of these Renaissance works and seems to ‘turn the body out’ (E. Braun, ‘The Red and the Black’, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2015, p. 67). Invoking fre’s potency to both maim and remake, Burri’s practice embraces radical transformation. The dynamic surface of Combustione Plastica is a meditation on the internal, a self-defined and autonomous world made new.