Alberto Burri

Galleria Blu, Milan
Private Collection, Turin
Private Collection, Europe
Acquired from the above by the previous owner

Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Alberto Burri, 1959, no. 17
Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lehnbachhaus, Neue Malerei: Form, Struktur, Bedeutung, 1960, no. 23

Marisa Volpi, 'Appunti sull'interpretazione critica di Burri', in: Arte Oggi, 1961, no. 10, p. 18, illustrated
Cesare Brandi and Vittorio Rubiu, Burri. Contributo al Catalogo Generale, Rome 1963, p. 212, no. 265, illustrated
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Eds., Burri. Contributi al Catalogo Sistematico, Città di Castello 1990, p. 225, no. 956, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly brighter and creamier in the original, and the illustration fails to convey the vivid red highlights along the top edge. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Close inspection reveals irregularities to the edges of the plastic on the left edge, which arise from the artist's choice of medium and appear under ultraviolet light to have been stabilised.
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In 1963, Cesare Brandi wrote that Alberto Burri “handles the flame like an infernal brush” (Cesare Brandi, Burri, Rome 1963, p.31). Redolent with chiaroscuro contrasts, and combining the varied textures of charred, virgin, and utterly destroyed plastic, Combustione Plastica brilliantly records a moment of dramatic catharsis between Burri and his canvas. An early combustione, the plastic boasts a thickness, materiality and visceral aspect absent from the later, thinner and transparent plastics. Flecks of bright red adorn the top of the canvas, enhancing the suggestion of transformative violence inherent to Burri’s method. Produced in 1958, a crucial year for Burri, it formed part of the oeuvre that launched the artist to international renown: in 1958 Burri was awarded Third Prize at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; in 1959 he won the Premio dell’Ariete in Milan and the UNESCO Prize at the São Paulo Bienal; in 1960 he was awarded the Critics’ Prize at the Venice Biennale. In subversively employing matter as the subject of his painting from the late 1940s, Alberto Burri looked to the limitless potential of materiality as a vehicle for artistic expression. His discovery of the combustione method applied to plastic represents the very apogee of this trajectory, fixing Burri as a key figure of twentieth century art.

The artist's biography and the political climate of Italy post-war suggest Burri's practice was a visceral response to the Second World War, Burri himself suffering detainment in an American Prisoner of War camp from 1944-45. Having qualified as a doctor before turning to art during his incarceration, biological and surgical comparisons have been made, comparing Burri's gaping apertures of molten plastic, scorched wood, and stitched burlap sacking to a living and bleeding body. In this sense, they offer a metaphor for the existential wound of the European collective-consciousness. As James Johnson Sweeney has remarked in his influential analysis: “What for Cubists would have been reduced to the partial distillation of a painted composition... in Burri's hands becomes a living organism: flesh and blood... The picture is human flesh, the artist a surgeon" (Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, L'Obelisco, Burri, 1955, n.p.). In the present work, the sensitive play of molten shapes and burnt-out voids implores the viewer's eye to scan the surface like an eviscerated landscape, taking in the violence and pathos redolent in the decaying forms. 

Fascinated by the concept of fire as a creative medium, Burri first approached its alchemical potential in collaboration with the writer Guiseppe Cenza in 1955.  In preparation for the November issue of magazine Civiltà delle Macchine, Burri conducted an early formal experiment during which paper and fabric were scorched and burned to optimum formal resolution.  Committed to an appropriate backing sheet, the results were thereafter published alongside an article by Cenza.  Marking the very birth of Burri's engagement with the aggressive transformations of fire, this experiment provoked a sustained dialogue initiated in the early Legno, Combustione and Ferro series, reaching the very highest tier in Plastica – superlatively exemplified by the present Combustione Plastica, an expansive work of unparalleled splendour.

By reducing sheets of plastic to blistering welts of carbonated and molten substance, the fundamentally destructive methodology of Burri's practice shares much in common with the philosophical school of existential nihilism. In nihilism, the threat of destruction precipitates alternate states of existence and realms of knowledge. As initially propounded by Friedrich Nietzsche, privileging the destructive potential of Dionysian abandon furnishes access to realms beyond the Apollonian veil of ordered and rationalised appearances. A line of inquiry later expounded by post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, destruction and annihilation were thus means for exposing alternate metaphysical planes of thought and existence, as harbouring an underlying existential 'truth.'  Engendered within an age of post-war disillusionment, Burri's work forges a visual counterpart to such theorems: by exposing the industrial materiality of plastic to the elemental force of fire, new life and beauty are propagated through brutality, laceration, and evisceration.  Combustione Plastica is a superlative example of this ground breaking artistic discovery: gaping voids of sublimated plastic skin chart a delicate compositional harmony across a field of varying colours and textures.

According to Carlo Pirovano, in Burri's work the moment of "panic" occasioned by fire's terrific devastation is surpassed "by the sublime regenerative potentiality which is innate to fire, exactly in the exploitation of that mythical gift which not so much consists in the destructive charge as it does in the possibility of transforming matter... of creating" (Carlo Pirovano, 'The Seasons of Fire', in: Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizione, Burri: 1915-1995 Retrospektive, 1997, p. 112).

Compounded by the repetitive tautological titling, which are never metaphorical or allusive, Burri's Combustione works evince drastic reduction via an agenda of minimal artistic intervention as a means of exposing the primary naturalness of materiality. This reductive autonomy stands in correlation to the contemporaneous work of Lucio Fontana, whilst inspiring and pre-figuring Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani in their quest for a dematerialization of the artwork as substantive of the real.  In this respect Burri's work, alongside that of Fontana, can be posited as the most radical of the 1950s in Italy; combining formal composition and random processes to bridge the generation of the Informel to the 1960s innovation of Arte Povera. Combustione Plastica, produced at the height of Burri’s formal advances, bespeaks his absolutely crucial role within the Italian artistic landscape whilst evincing the sublime heights his output could reach.