Alberto Burri at Estorick

Born amidst the political and artistic chaos of the First World War, and dying amidst the ‘post- post-modern’ consumerism of Europe in the 1990s, Alberto Burri’s life and art represent complete microcosms of human experience in the twentieth century.

Burri’s contribution to modern art has been internationally recognised, but strangely neglected in the UK. This exhibition at the North London Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is his first solo retrospective since the 1960s. His hugely physical abstract paintings have been seen as parallels of Pollock and Rothko in America, but he remains devoutly Italianate, and void of pretension.

There is a strong biographical tract to the Estorick’s exhibition, which reinforces the analogous relationship between the artist and the 20th century. Burri took to painting relatively late. Having trained and served as a medic during World War Two, he was taken by the Americans as a prisoner of war, and held in a camp in Texas. It was here that Burri first began painting, and this autodidactic approach is evident in his early paintings, which collectively give the sense of a mind floundering through back-catalogues of modern art. There is a strong expressionist dimension to these early paintings, echoing Van Gogh’s more dream-like compositions or Van Dongen’s melancholia. Gradually his work passes through surrealism – he almost captures the metaphysical quality of de Chirico in Fishing at Fano  – and abstraction – small tempera-on-card paintings mimic Miro or Kandinsky. That it is so natural to read heavy influence into these eclectic works reveals their unoriginality.

It was in the early 1950s that Burri freed himself from the yoke of tradition, as much as that is possible, and began developing the unorthodox abstract expressionism with which he is now associated. He began developing the artistic potential of oil and tar, and later sacking, sheets of metal and plastic. The mortality of the material is emphasised, and the notion of the labouring artist as craftsman is powerful. There is also a strong sense of engagement with the material land, which reflects Burri’s influence upon the Arte Povera movement of the 1980s.

Burri’s obscure abstraction demands interpretation and linguistic explanation, and yet at the same times denies any coherence. His subject is primarily the celebration of the act of composition, and the integrity of the materials themselves. “Words are no help to me when I try to speak about painting, they talk around the picture. What I have to express appears in the picture.”  But as a viewer this is simply not enough. We search for more, for an ulterior level. We read landscapes and facial expressions into tears within sacking. Burri’s scarred and stitched collages seem to reflect the fragmented and scarred state of post-war Europe, sustained through its grim, almost desperate semblance of unity. In our interpretive candour, our obsessive erection of a contextual narrative, what we struggle with most of all is the meaningless of the constructive process.

What emerges from these paintings is the physicality and mentality of the artistic process, both in its practice and theory. Burri is significant as his mixed media constructions symbolise the beginning of the final ascent to the intellectual pinnacle of modernism, a project instigated by Manet, among others, in the mid-nineteenth century. This project is the unearthing and deconstruction of the creative process. Burri tracks this development to its apogee, and his work retains a complexity and physical force. Yet they also lose the subtlety of the early modernists, forged through the dialectic interplay between traditional convention and the destruction of this artistic orthodoxy.

The final room of this exhibition, containing a series of cracked black plaster on canvas, is poignant. There is a stillness and a reflective quality here, but the work feels tired, the canvasses are like creased, weathered skin. In its complete abstraction, the work loses its point of reference with the past. Disconnected from its artistic heritage, and thus temporally incoherent, the ultra-conceptual nature of this late work loses the energy of Burri’s earlier experimental painting. It becomes static.  And so the analogy between Burri and the 20th century stays true to the last, and leaving the exhibition there is an unsavoury aroma pressing around the creases of my mind – one of morbid stagnation.

Image Captions

1. Alberto Burri (1915 to 1995)
White Cretto, 1975
Acrovinyl on cellotex
42 x 85 cm
Galleria delle Arti, Citta’ di Castello
© Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, 2012

2. Alberto Burri (1915 to 1995)
Sacking and Red, 1954
Acrylic and hessian collage on canvas
86.4 x 100.3 cm
Tate, London
© Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, 2012