ART CITIES:Venice-Alberto Burri

Alberti Burri belongs to a generation of artists who experienced the suffering inflicted by World War II. Attacking fine-art traditions had long been a creative principle of the modernist Avant-Garde. After the catastrophes of totalitarianism and genocide, however, traditional means of representation seemed especially inadequate and even the value of art or poetry appeared questionable.

By Dimitris Lempesis

The exhibition “BURRI: Painting, Irreducible Presence” chronologically reconstructs the most significant stages in the artistic development of Alberto Burri through many of his most important works. From the very rare “Tars” (1948) to the last, monumental series of “Cellotex” (1994), the exhibition features 50 works from major Italian and International Museums, the Fondazione Burri and Private Collections. Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello. In 1940 he received a degree in medicine from the Università degli Studi di Perugia. He served in the Ethiopian campaign and in World War II, Following his unit’s May 1943 capture in Tunisia he began painting in 1944 in a Texas prisoner-of-war camp. There he developed his surgeon’s skill into artistic creation. He used the limited materials available to him at the camp, converting them into works marked by his experience of turmoil and violence. He sewed together scraps of burlap, metal, and wood to create metaphors for torn and bleeding flesh. In February 1946, Burri was repatriated to Italy and set up a studio in Rome. Burri made his first trip to Paris in 1948–49, where he saw the tar-paper collages of Joan Miró and figurative paintings with coarse, bituminous backgrounds by Jean Dubuffet. Upon his return to Rome, Burri began to experiment with his first signature material: pitch-black tar. He mixed it with heated oil paint, black enamel, and ground pumice stone to create the “Catrami” a group of around 30 works that date to 1948–52. They announced the artist’s method of working with one dominant material to create various textures and gradations of relief. In 1950 Burri wedged two tree branches behind a canvas, causing distortions on the front. He gave the name “Gobbi” to this series in which the picture plane is bent out of shape and thrust into the viewer’s space. He soon began using curved metal rods to prod the fabric support. While at medical school, Burri had conducted his research thesis on rickets, a disease causing bone deformation, and he was familiar with kyphosis, or severe curvature of the spine. The “Muffe” are named for their visual effects rather than for a material per se. They display mud-colored lumps and layers of sludge that resemble bacterial invasion, soil, or excrement. “Mold” is the generic term for the many types of fungal spores that germinate in humid conditions. Burri approximated the look of mold by mixing ground pumice stone with paint, mineral particles, and synthetic resins. The clusters appear to fester in a state of simultaneous growth and decay, wreaking havoc on the painting surface. Burri was fascinated by the central role of white in Western art: the plaster intonaco, or smooth ground underlying frescoes; the gesso preparatory layer of easel painting; and the lead, titanium, and zinc white pigments employed for concealing and highlighting. In the “Bianchi”, white comes into its own as color, process, and material. Burri illuminates our perceptions of white by varying tone, texture, and finish to create passages that are by turns creamy, chalky, opaque, translucent, warm, cool, glossy, and matte. He rarely used an artist’s brush, choosing instead to spread on the pigments with his fingers, a palette knife, or a trowel—the tool of bricklayers and plasterers. The Bianchi thus make visible the different actions of whitening or covering in white, whether on a canvas or a wall. In 1950 Burri made his first “Sacco” from a cast-off burlap bag mounted on a stretcher. During his time in a Texas prisoner-of-war camp (1943-46), the artist had used found gunnysacks as canvases for figurative paintings. In the series, the unpainted burlap functions as both support and ground. Form, line, color, and tone emerge from the textile’s warp and woof, stains, patches, and stitches. Burlap is produced with jute, a coarse fiber related to the finer linen used for artists’ canvases. As a result, the worn and tattered material looks like a traumatized version of a traditional canvas. Burlap was ubiquitous on the front lines during World War II, and used for supply sacks, sandbags, and camouflage. The “Sacchi”, however, respond to the historical context of postwar Italy as an impoverished country dependent on the charity of the United States.bIn the mid-1950s Burri adopted materials essential to the building industry and to Italy’s postwar reconstruction. Instead of giving new life to fabric remnants, he repurposed pristine wood veneer, sheet metal, plastic sheeting, and insulation board. He also developed a new process of burning materials, which he called combustion. The “Legni” are composed of thin laminates, usually of birch or oak, meant to replicate expensive hardwood furniture and wall paneling. With the flame of an oxyacetylene torch, the artist buckled the golden-hued surfaces, painted brooding shadows, and carved jagged-edged holes. The veneer’s association with human shelter adds to the searing power of the charred passages. The “Legni” provoke instinctive reactions to fire: the desire to feel its warmth and ponder the multicolored glow braced by the knowledge that it can cause pain and destruction in a flash. The “Ferri” of 1958–61 are made of cold-rolled steel (an iron alloy) straight from the mill. Modernist artists had previously assembled found-metal objects or welded iron into three-dimensional figures and abstract geometries. Burri’s innovation was to cut and join the sheets into austere reliefs, nail them to a support, and hang them on the wall as a form of industrial monochrome. Factory marks and inscriptions function as graphic and coloristic flourishes. The artist stitched the metal planes together with a welding rod and torch, forming seams of weld beads and slag. By varying the heat of the flame, he produced blue, brown, purple, and yellow tones on the steel canvases. The “Combustioni plastiche” exemplify Burri’s means of finding beauty where one would least expect it—in mass-produced, disposable things.As Italy’s era of reconstruction ended in the late 1950s and the nation experienced an economic boom, Burri began to experiment with industrial plastic sheeting. Distributed in large rolls, it was primarily used for packaging and tarpaulins. Each type of plastic adopted by Burri has a slightly different speed of combustion. The red and transparent works are made with polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and the black examples from polyethylene (PE). Using torches and lamps to melt the plastic, he draped and sculpted it; once cooled, it retained its new shape. He often encased the whole in another translucent membrane and fashioned visible air pockets, or voids within voids. The “Cretti” were inspired in part by the parched landscape of Death Valley; Burri and his wife, Minsa Craig, resided in Los Angeles during the winters from 1963 until 1991. But the series’ origins lie in a technique the artist had been exploring since 1948: inducing craquelure, the fine cracks one sees on aging paintings. The “Cretti” are made with a traditional artist’s pigment, zinc white, which forms a brittle paint film prone to cracking if not mixed with proper amounts of binder. Exploiting what other artists consider a limitation, Burri deliberately prompted some of the widest and deepest craquelure in the history of art. In contrast the “Cellotex” compositions are precisely determined. Burri had employed Celotex insulation board as a support intermittently throughout his career (the brand name is spelled with one l, while Burri used two in his titles). Now he scored through the surface, exposed the fibrous interior, and peeled back layers to form planes of barely perceptible relief. For the most part Burri worked in monochrome: with either the prefabricated ocher color of the fiberboard or layers of black paint. Many “Cellotex” were conceived as multipartite narrative cycles, each panel a different iteration of a given set of shapes. The late works revisit the geometric and biomorphic motifs and pitch-black color of the “Catrami”, affirming Burri’s retrospective view of his career: “My last picture is the same as the first”.

Info: Curator: Bruno Corà, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Duration: 10/5-28/7/19, Daily 10:00-17:00, www.cini.it