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Rating: I arrive there after having passed my nose over the lush whiskers of my cat and after giving a kiss full of meanings to mademoiselle-la-Jockeuse, a kiss that reminded me once again how important it is in love - if we really want to use that term - a truth that is only seemingly cynical and laid-back: "we must not bore each other’s balls."
I get there after a tremulous journey on the Cesena-Roma highway, for long stretches obscenely single-laned, and after cursing my reluctance to equip the Cosmic-mobile with a proper air conditioning system.
I arrive there after a frugal snack at a rest area consisting of a half-frozen Cucciolone accompanied by the usual disappointing cartoon scribbled on the biscuit and the appearance of a tantalizing derriere of a German girl, a delicacy partially ruined by the insidious stereotype that the sinister effects of the beer & kraut diet will soon enough distort what is perfectly shaped today.
I arrive there after a rigorously rare beef steak soaked with half a liter of Sangiovese and a stroll around Città di Castello Centro where a rather polemic plaque set into the side portal of the church of San Francesco informs me that the magnificent "Marriage of the Virgin" by Raphael - once the pride and boast of the local faithful - is now in the Brera museum of Milan, for reasons not better specified.
I especially arrive there after a visit to Palazzo Albizzini containing an initial Burri Collection composed of works he himself selected as representative of his mature artistic journey which began in 1948 and which is characterized by a language dominated by the use of unconventional materials. Works divided into pictorial cycles, each characterized by a particular technique and experimentation: initially, dense and ragged portions of tar are mounted on the canvas, cauterized with handfuls of coarse sand, then the canvas itself is conceived as a heap of lacerated - and lacerating - fragments of jute bags stitched together with heavy black thread and torn apart by flesh-colored brushstrokes; if the daring shades of the fungal efflorescence network of the large "Whites" reveal the full richness and eloquence of a monochromatic microcosm, then furious yet meticulous collages of worn, torn, and patched garments capture the attention with their faded, chewed, and gnawed colors; while combustions of thin wood sheets, cellophane and plastic create delicate yet expressive veins almost woven into the air, it is then the throbbing tangibility of Mother Earth framed by the spotlights of white and black cretti, varied beyond belief in thickness and the pattern of the craquelure.
Anyway, in the end, I get there. Maybe slightly exhausted, perhaps a little overheated, even vaguely tipsy, but I get there.
And already in the parking lot - with the walls of the former tobacco drying sheds entirely painted black and the three gigantic iron sculptures in the courtyard like the three heads of a postmodern Cerberus - I understand I have arrived in a in limine zone, on a borderline, a frontier land. But far from wanting to terrify or dissuade, all the open space seemed to say: "cultivate every hope, you who enter."
The first room is a sort of ouvertoure, an invitation to the journey as well as an ideal trait d'union with the works displayed in Palazzo Albizzini and I must confess that the "Gran Plastica" measuring 5 meters by 5, watched over by the severe eyes of two black cretti placed on the sides, immediately stirred something inside me. That pearly light beaming frontally and seemingly concealing an unspeakable truth, that threshold beyond which every anxiety would be calmed and every desire satisfied, those burly and omnipotent guardians imposing such a peremptory, insurmountable ban: yes, I felt a bit like that poor farmer of Kafkaesque memory who desperately yearned for the Law and whose efforts were invariably frustrated by an immovable guardian.
Don't worry, I won't engage in an ignominious room-by-room tour but let me at least point out the importance of the exhibition space. The former tobacco drying sheds are divided into eleven soberly, functionally lit rooms stretched out in a considerable length where Burri's works are placed on the long sides and - one each - on the short sides.
The works in this Collection seem to abandon the convulsive materiality of Our Artist's "first season" of creativity to embrace a kind of geometric carnality, chaotic rigor, lucid tension towards mystery developed especially through acrylic paintings on the wooden mix of cellotex. Furthermore, over the years Burri seems to have found a firmer awareness of composition: the works at Palazzo Albizzini were splendid poems but "closed," "concluded" in themselves; they were variations on the theme of a determined experiment with a material that - rather than communicating with each other - dissolved into soliloquies. In the former tobacco drying sheds, instead, each room has its own poetics where each work - also selected and placed carefully by Burri himself - is a verse with its own full and irreplaceable meaning only when placed within the relative poem.
In Burri, perhaps influenced by my initial impression, I found something of Kafka.
As soon as I enter the "Journey" room the immediate visual impact lingers on the polychromy that, in crescendo, bursts from the canvases as the gaze extends towards the back and if - at first - the gold, blue, and red details with their bizarre shape and, from that perspective, tiny dimension make one think of a masquerade ball of many Odradek (a little creature of ineffable shape that with its mere presence haunted the thoughts of the narrator of "The Cares of a Family Man"), slowly advancing through the "nave" all those unusual situations, unexpected conjunctions, kaleidoscopic angularities almost faithfully retrace the psychedelic adventure of the protagonist in "Description of a Struggle".
Moreover, if you walk the room in reverse and thus move from color to black, it feels like a descent into darkness; but not just any darkness, rather that of reason which so often can produce those incomprehensible and irrefutable arbitraries experienced by the poor Karl banished from home by Uncle Edward in "Amerika" or those insane curses that destroyed Georg's life in "The Judgment".
In the "Orsanmichele" room where the works seem almost to divert attention and "prevent" an approach to the "Gran Nero" - a monolithic cretto of black painted iron - placed right at the back, it feels like having to retrace all the false trails and dead ends that bogged down the steps of the land surveyor K. in his vain attempt to reach Klamm, the supreme official of "The Castle".
And what about the "Metamorfotex" room where the adjoining arrangement of paintings - without any interval between frames - in a gradual chromatic transformation from sand color to black, seems intended to evoke the feverish night that transformed Gregor Samsa into that hideous insect of "The Metamorphosis".
Moreover, in the room "Annottarsi" composed of large black cellotex, you can read on a plaque that Burri "was not an artist who loved to keep up with painting nor let alone the principles related to art". Translated onto another plane, it was a bit what the protagonist of the "Investigations of a Dog" thought about scientific development: "science progresses, it cannot be stopped, rather it advances with accelerated rhythm, ever faster, but what's there to praise? It would be like exalting someone because over the years he grows older and therefore comes closer ever faster to death".
Yes, there's something of Kafka in Burri. There's the same universe where a Law issued by an unreachable Elsewhere prevails. A Law that is inscrutable, mandatory, crystalline in execution, and perfectly ordered, even when this order stems from the absolute precision of a geometric Chaos.
But with one difference: the Law in Kafka oppresses and punishes, in Burri it soothes and elevates.
And this sense of liberating Elsewhere is still with me when I get back in the car, make the return journey, return to my apartments, and - finally - lie down in bed.
Only in the morning, when I begin to feel the claws of daily life around my neck, the back of a thought begins to flicker in the depths of my double coffee in front of me: the awareness of all the opportunities for Beauty I've wasted, that I'm neglecting and that I will never know.
Until that day comes, the day when someone or something will stab me twice in the heart and I, like Josef K., will be able to do nothing but murmur: "like a dog!".
And then, really, it will seem that only shame will have to survive me.
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