Nero con punti rossi (Black with Red Stitches)

With its raw, encrusted surface, Alberto Burri’s Nero con punti rossi is an outstanding example of his celebrated Neri. Swaths of burlap cloak a blackened expanse, attached with vigorous, large stitches that separate the glossy and coarse sections of the canvas. Executed in 1957, the work was created as Burri’s international star was on the rise, coinciding with his mid-career retrospective at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Taking its place within a practice that challenged all pre-conceived notions of medium specificity, Nero con punti rossi harnesses various construction techniques including collage, painting and sewing to fuse its disparate elements. The Neri were central to Burri’s practice: he began his experiments with black as both a colour and a conceptual preoccupation in 1948. Using tar, enamel and oil paint, he eliminated the work’s subject, frame and canvas to form a new poetics of non-representation. For the artist, black represented chromatic purity and allowed his tactile surfaces to more forcefully assert themselves. He viewed his creations as simultaneously reductive and expressive, and the ensuing compositions were intended to be self-sufficient and self-reflexive. The brazen rigour of this philosophy proved influential for a range of artists including Piero Manzoni, who began developing his Achromes the year that the present work was created. With its emphasis on material realism, Nero con punti rossi is an exemplary early summation of the artist’s vision.

Burri’s stitches were a form of anti-painting, and a direct contrast to the machismo gestures of New York’s Action Painters. His use of sewing embraced both domestic and medicinal histories, invoking his time as an army doctor in Africa during the Second World War. His medical vocation, captivity and return to a war-torn Italy are all retrospectively seen as foundational to his aesthetic. The use of sackcloth, his veneration of humble materials and techniques, and the noticeable absence of real world referents together suggest a disenchanted vision of the world: the art historian Herbert Read described ‘charred edges and rugged cicatrices’ that ‘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 (ed.), Alberto Burri: Form and Matter, exh. cat., Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 2011, p. 5). The present work’s rich craquelure is reminiscent of an arid land, anticipating the artist’s later Cretti. As a devoted admirer of Quattrocento painting, Burri saw his scarred, cracked surfaces not as evidence of decay, but rather as self-contained topographies. The fractured lattice in Nero con punti rossi was achieved by mixing glue into his paint, allowing the web of delicate lines to emerge and unfold. The aesthetics of healing remained central to Burri’s work, and in its stitched unions and carefully contemplated creases lies the hope for regeneration. Nero con punti rossi is a promise for the future.