Alberto Burri
Plastica 1962

Burri, a Classic Author.

With his plastics from the sixties, the idea of art is completely revolutionized.

Apparently, one is faced with a daring experimentalism that destroys any idea of more or less conventional painting in favor of an unreflected, extemporaneous expression, but "thrown" onto the canvas, thanks to the teachings of a Pollock. An artistic '68 is prophesied and realized, which seems to want to sweep away everything that has been said, thought, and created before. A kind of free jazz of art.

But it's not like that, or not just like that.

Burri is a classic artist whose trajectory perfectly aligns with another great from his land, geographically very close to him, Piero della Francesca. Like Piero, Burri paints the essential. He eliminates any idea of rhetoric, embellishment, frill, academia, virtuosism, descending unerringly and courageously into what could be called a ruthless plastic existentialism. A real journey to the end of the night.

The plastics, like the cretti, hyper-realistically photograph the soul of the 20th century. Everything is deconstructed to then be recomposed in light of what the human eye had never seen before. The war, the world one, the extermination camps, the ideological fury. Burri knows these realities well for having experienced them firsthand, not just as a witness, but as a protagonist. His first painting was created in a concentration camp, where he was a prisoner.  And so, in the face of such upheaval, the artist feels that the dimensions known up until today are no longer sufficient, it is necessary to go beyond, inside and beyond the material.

He embarks on a journey similar to the one taken by his beloved Piero della Francesca through the little-known lands of perspective. Revolutionary, scientific, poetic. Telescope and microscope to see before and beyond. Both in love with the purity of colors. The blue for Piero, color of essence and metaphysics par excellence. The red for Alberto. The blood, the essence of pain, of life.

And then the tears, to see what is beyond. Beyond the pain, beyond the color, beyond death. Desperately. Until reaching the black hermeticism of the last paintings, those of the Seccatoi of Città di Castello, where the word death is materially engraved (one would say, and not even metaphorically, in clear letters) on the canvases.

But behind the crateric scream of the red plastics, how can one not see the harmony of the line that still, almost desperately, in a last gasp of salvation, feeds on the Madonnas of the Birth and the Upper Tiberian hills.

From the humus  of a humanistic religion, of which Burri was a true believer and founder.