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Lot Essay
'My painting... 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... Were I master of an exact and less threadbare terminology, were I a marvellously alert and enlightened scholar, I still could not verbally establish a close connection with my painting: my words would be marginal notes upon the truth within the canvas. For years pictures have led me, and my work is just a way of stimulating the drive. 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' (A. Burri, quoted in 'Words Are of No Help', in A.C. Ritchie (ed.), The New Decade, exh. cat, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, p. 82).
Nero con punti rossi (Black with red spots) is a rare early Nero painting made by Alberto Burri in 1957. It is distinctive among these early works in that it makes specific use of a combination of different media to establish its bold, dynamic and fascinatingly expressive material surface. Part stretched and torn fabric, ripped, pulled and stitched together over a canvas ground, part charred-looking, cretto-like encrustations of vinavil (glue) and an acrylic black painted surface flecked in places with red, the work is one that asserts itself powerfully as a richly varied and imposing material presence.
Like most of Burri's works bearing the 'Nero' title, Nero con punti rossi is predominantly black. As in a work such as Saccho e Nero of 1954 (Fondazione Burri, Palazzo Albizzii, Citta di Castello), however, Burri has forged an alliance in this work between the dark encrustations and foreboding hollows of his Nero paintings and the raw expression of bare, unpainted canvas reminiscent of his great watershed works of the early 1950s, the Sacchi. For Burri, the black of the Neri represented a purity of colour that allowed the all important form of his surfaces to assert themselves more directly. Black, a colour Burri used repeatedly throughout his career, was the most fundamental of all the colours. It was the ultimate 'reduction of colour to its simplest, expressive function... peremptory and incisive' that he, along with Capogrossi, Ballocco and Colla had demanded in their 1951 manifesto of the Gruppo Origine' ('Fondazione Origine Manifesto' quoted in J.J. Sweeney, 'Introduction', Alberto Burri, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1963, unpaged). Black, beneath which, as in this work, red can also often be glimpsed, is, as Renato Miracco has written of it, 'the base colour of Burri's work, a colour made up of infinite smudgings and deep shadows. Black is never just itself. More than any other colour it alludes to the concrete yet indefinable construction of form, it is associated with form rather than with expression' (M. Gale and R. Miracco, Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2005, p. 32).
Adopting a process that echoes the nigredo or 'blackening' stage in alchemical practice, Burri often attained the 'nero' state of many of his pictures, particularly the legni and the combustion, through the interaction of fire, as a way of reducing his materials to the point of their putrefying essence, the point of their most basic nature. This was because he recognised that it is only at this point that the unique properties of his materials are at their most pure and that it is in this state that they are best able to express the unique nature of what they are. Unlike his later fire-born works, Nero con punti rossi is a work whose forms suggest this same process of destruction without the recourse to burning. The cracked surface of the vinavil, anticipating the crevices of Burri's later Cretto paintings, provide a painterly surface that calls to mind charred remains, while the gaping holes, tears and stitched fabric pulling and stretching across the rest of the work establish a profound material sense of both injury and makeshift repair. As Herbert Read famously wrote of Burri's work in this respect, the evocative power of his material surfaces appeared, in the immediate post-war era of the 1950s, to be indicative of a radical new anti-beauty. Seeming to have single-handedly created a defiant, elemental art rooted solely in the fundamental properties of material, his work appeared to fly in the face of all conventional notions of aesthetics and to be forged from the hard, raw, existential truths about mankind learned during the war. It expounded solely a profound sense of material form reflective of the ravaged landscape of Europe and the universal scale of human suffering that had recently swept through the world. 'Every patch in the sacking' Read, proclaimed, 'every gaping wound-like hole, the charred edges and rugged cicatrices, reveal the raw sensibility of an artist outraged by the hypocrisy of a society that presumes to speak of beauty, tradition, humanism, justice and other fine virtues, and is at the same time willing to contemplate the mass destruction of the human race' (H. Read, quoted in M. Duranti, Alberto Burri, Form and Matter, exh. cat., Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 2012, p. 5). The American critic James Johnson Sweeney even went so far at this time as to claim that, 'Burri transforms rags into a metaphor for bleeding human flesh, breathes fresh life into the inanimate materials which he employs, making them live and bleed; then heals the wounds with the same evocative ability and the same sensibility with which he first inflicted them. What for the Cubists would have been reduced to the partial distillation of a painted composition, to a Merzbild for Schwitters, in Burri's hands becomes a living organism: flesh and blood...The picture is human flesh; the artist a surgeon' (J.J. Sweeney, quoted in M. Gale and R. Miracco, Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni, exh. cat., Tate , London, 2005, p. 32).
Intrinsic within many of these works, as in Nero con punti rossi, is also the notion of healing and repair. Burri's remarkable biographical journey from doctor to prisoner of war and then to artist sewing pieces of sackcloth together in his internment camp in Hereford, Texas had led not only to his profound engagement with such 'poor materials' as a powerful, expressive and elemental medium of raw existential truth, but also to a deep understanding of their ability to bind, bandage and heal. It is these qualities along with the nature of fabric to rent and tear that inform much of the extraordinary range of formal expression that Burri is able to convey in the fabric surfaces of the Sacchi and Neri 'paintings' he made in the 1950s.
As the artist's longtime friend and critic Maurizio Calvesi has written of the artist, Burri, in these works, '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. These two operations - that of Pollock and Burri - were the two most significant acts in the genesis of Informal art and the most consequential for subsequent experiments of the avant-garde' (M. Calvesi, Alberto Burri, New York 1975, p. 9).
Nero con punti rossi (Black with red spots) is a rare early Nero painting made by Alberto Burri in 1957. It is distinctive among these early works in that it makes specific use of a combination of different media to establish its bold, dynamic and fascinatingly expressive material surface. Part stretched and torn fabric, ripped, pulled and stitched together over a canvas ground, part charred-looking, cretto-like encrustations of vinavil (glue) and an acrylic black painted surface flecked in places with red, the work is one that asserts itself powerfully as a richly varied and imposing material presence.
Like most of Burri's works bearing the 'Nero' title, Nero con punti rossi is predominantly black. As in a work such as Saccho e Nero of 1954 (Fondazione Burri, Palazzo Albizzii, Citta di Castello), however, Burri has forged an alliance in this work between the dark encrustations and foreboding hollows of his Nero paintings and the raw expression of bare, unpainted canvas reminiscent of his great watershed works of the early 1950s, the Sacchi. For Burri, the black of the Neri represented a purity of colour that allowed the all important form of his surfaces to assert themselves more directly. Black, a colour Burri used repeatedly throughout his career, was the most fundamental of all the colours. It was the ultimate 'reduction of colour to its simplest, expressive function... peremptory and incisive' that he, along with Capogrossi, Ballocco and Colla had demanded in their 1951 manifesto of the Gruppo Origine' ('Fondazione Origine Manifesto' quoted in J.J. Sweeney, 'Introduction', Alberto Burri, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1963, unpaged). Black, beneath which, as in this work, red can also often be glimpsed, is, as Renato Miracco has written of it, 'the base colour of Burri's work, a colour made up of infinite smudgings and deep shadows. Black is never just itself. More than any other colour it alludes to the concrete yet indefinable construction of form, it is associated with form rather than with expression' (M. Gale and R. Miracco, Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2005, p. 32).
Adopting a process that echoes the nigredo or 'blackening' stage in alchemical practice, Burri often attained the 'nero' state of many of his pictures, particularly the legni and the combustion, through the interaction of fire, as a way of reducing his materials to the point of their putrefying essence, the point of their most basic nature. This was because he recognised that it is only at this point that the unique properties of his materials are at their most pure and that it is in this state that they are best able to express the unique nature of what they are. Unlike his later fire-born works, Nero con punti rossi is a work whose forms suggest this same process of destruction without the recourse to burning. The cracked surface of the vinavil, anticipating the crevices of Burri's later Cretto paintings, provide a painterly surface that calls to mind charred remains, while the gaping holes, tears and stitched fabric pulling and stretching across the rest of the work establish a profound material sense of both injury and makeshift repair. As Herbert Read famously wrote of Burri's work in this respect, the evocative power of his material surfaces appeared, in the immediate post-war era of the 1950s, to be indicative of a radical new anti-beauty. Seeming to have single-handedly created a defiant, elemental art rooted solely in the fundamental properties of material, his work appeared to fly in the face of all conventional notions of aesthetics and to be forged from the hard, raw, existential truths about mankind learned during the war. It expounded solely a profound sense of material form reflective of the ravaged landscape of Europe and the universal scale of human suffering that had recently swept through the world. 'Every patch in the sacking' Read, proclaimed, 'every gaping wound-like hole, the charred edges and rugged cicatrices, reveal the raw sensibility of an artist outraged by the hypocrisy of a society that presumes to speak of beauty, tradition, humanism, justice and other fine virtues, and is at the same time willing to contemplate the mass destruction of the human race' (H. Read, quoted in M. Duranti, Alberto Burri, Form and Matter, exh. cat., Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 2012, p. 5). The American critic James Johnson Sweeney even went so far at this time as to claim that, 'Burri transforms rags into a metaphor for bleeding human flesh, breathes fresh life into the inanimate materials which he employs, making them live and bleed; then heals the wounds with the same evocative ability and the same sensibility with which he first inflicted them. What for the Cubists would have been reduced to the partial distillation of a painted composition, to a Merzbild for Schwitters, in Burri's hands becomes a living organism: flesh and blood...The picture is human flesh; the artist a surgeon' (J.J. Sweeney, quoted in M. Gale and R. Miracco, Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni, exh. cat., Tate , London, 2005, p. 32).
Intrinsic within many of these works, as in Nero con punti rossi, is also the notion of healing and repair. Burri's remarkable biographical journey from doctor to prisoner of war and then to artist sewing pieces of sackcloth together in his internment camp in Hereford, Texas had led not only to his profound engagement with such 'poor materials' as a powerful, expressive and elemental medium of raw existential truth, but also to a deep understanding of their ability to bind, bandage and heal. It is these qualities along with the nature of fabric to rent and tear that inform much of the extraordinary range of formal expression that Burri is able to convey in the fabric surfaces of the Sacchi and Neri 'paintings' he made in the 1950s.
As the artist's longtime friend and critic Maurizio Calvesi has written of the artist, Burri, in these works, '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. These two operations - that of Pollock and Burri - were the two most significant acts in the genesis of Informal art and the most consequential for subsequent experiments of the avant-garde' (M. Calvesi, Alberto Burri, New York 1975, p. 9).