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Lot Essay
Alberto Burri's Rosso Plastica highlights his medium's transformative properties in a striking, tactile vermillion red composition from his impressive series of plastiche. Burri submitted the plastic and cloth to burning, scorching, scarring and ruching to create a richly textured and visceral composition. In Rosso Plastica, the flames have penetrated the work's surface in four distinct punctures, charring the curled edges of these gaping orifices. Burri wrought this infernal image with volcanic punctuations that perfectly express fire's primordial power. In Rosso Plastica, Burri created a novel and subversive "Simulation of a picture, a sort of trompe-l'oeil in reverse, in which it is not painting which simulates reality, but reality that simulates painting" (G. C. Argan, "Alberto Burri," 1960, quoted in M. Vetrocq, "Painting and Beyond: Recovery and Regeneration, 1943-1952," in G. Celant (ed.), The Italian Metemorphosis, 1943-1968, exh. cat., New York, 1994).
Burri first forayed into the combustion's possibilities in 1954-1955 when the artist began to investigate the rich effects fire evinced on paper, timber and metal, drawing forth sumptuous changes of color and texture. As Herbert Read once wrote, "Whatever [Burri] does ... his sensibility dominates the intractable material, to such an extent that a transmutation takes place, an alchemical process in which rubbish is redeemed in the alembic of the artist's sensibility to become the 'perfect body' of a work of art" (H. Read, 1960, quoted in G. Nordland (ed.), Alberto Burri: A Retrospective View 1948-1977, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 1977, p. 53). Burri innovatively used pyrotechnical processes, importantly prefiguring the work of his contemporaries and in particular Yves Klein, who was to create his first fire paintings with the use of a flame-thrower in 1961. In 1961-1962, Burri began manipulating plastics, divided into three chromatic variations: Rosso, Nero and Bianche. In Rosso Plastica he visibly mutated the red plastic's opaque surface by fire, being draped, stretched and coagulated to render the effect of rich impasto painting. He maneuvered the surface's multiple skins to forge sensual craters in the composition, blackened and burnished through the effects of fire. Burri immortalized the realized effect by using a transparent plastic film to finish the relief, providing a radiant luster, and embalming the work with its traces of smoke.
In Rosso Plastica, Burri artfully captures the image of fire, charging the material with burning's energy and violence. The process's distinctive automatism makes Burri's art unique in its place and time. In this respect, Burri was drawing affinities with the group of artists including Lucio Fontana who called themselves Spazialisti. They believed that "The essence of a work of art lay not in the enduring physical fact of the product but in the 'spectacular instant' of the visual experience" (E. Prampolini, 1944, quoted in G. Celant (ed.), p. 27). Most pertinently, Burri aimed to redeem banal or impoverished materials and transform them into art works. He defiled the figurative tradition, violating the surface with extra-pictorial elements in this strikingly defiant approach, in a manner akin to the matiérisme favored by Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet.
Rosso Plastica celebrates the disembodied physicality of art's material, a concept that went on to inform subsequent generations of artists, including Piero Manzoni and Jannis Kounnelis, as well as others united under Conceptualism, Minimalism and Arte Povera. Burri worked at the height of the European avant-garde, powerfully informing and engaging with the prevailing forces of Art Informel, eschewing rationalism and idealism in response to the crisis of post-War reconstruction. The rasped dynamics of Burri's Rosso Plastica give us a potent work of expressive beauty.
Burri first forayed into the combustion's possibilities in 1954-1955 when the artist began to investigate the rich effects fire evinced on paper, timber and metal, drawing forth sumptuous changes of color and texture. As Herbert Read once wrote, "Whatever [Burri] does ... his sensibility dominates the intractable material, to such an extent that a transmutation takes place, an alchemical process in which rubbish is redeemed in the alembic of the artist's sensibility to become the 'perfect body' of a work of art" (H. Read, 1960, quoted in G. Nordland (ed.), Alberto Burri: A Retrospective View 1948-1977, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 1977, p. 53). Burri innovatively used pyrotechnical processes, importantly prefiguring the work of his contemporaries and in particular Yves Klein, who was to create his first fire paintings with the use of a flame-thrower in 1961. In 1961-1962, Burri began manipulating plastics, divided into three chromatic variations: Rosso, Nero and Bianche. In Rosso Plastica he visibly mutated the red plastic's opaque surface by fire, being draped, stretched and coagulated to render the effect of rich impasto painting. He maneuvered the surface's multiple skins to forge sensual craters in the composition, blackened and burnished through the effects of fire. Burri immortalized the realized effect by using a transparent plastic film to finish the relief, providing a radiant luster, and embalming the work with its traces of smoke.
In Rosso Plastica, Burri artfully captures the image of fire, charging the material with burning's energy and violence. The process's distinctive automatism makes Burri's art unique in its place and time. In this respect, Burri was drawing affinities with the group of artists including Lucio Fontana who called themselves Spazialisti. They believed that "The essence of a work of art lay not in the enduring physical fact of the product but in the 'spectacular instant' of the visual experience" (E. Prampolini, 1944, quoted in G. Celant (ed.), p. 27). Most pertinently, Burri aimed to redeem banal or impoverished materials and transform them into art works. He defiled the figurative tradition, violating the surface with extra-pictorial elements in this strikingly defiant approach, in a manner akin to the matiérisme favored by Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet.
Rosso Plastica celebrates the disembodied physicality of art's material, a concept that went on to inform subsequent generations of artists, including Piero Manzoni and Jannis Kounnelis, as well as others united under Conceptualism, Minimalism and Arte Povera. Burri worked at the height of the European avant-garde, powerfully informing and engaging with the prevailing forces of Art Informel, eschewing rationalism and idealism in response to the crisis of post-War reconstruction. The rasped dynamics of Burri's Rosso Plastica give us a potent work of expressive beauty.