“Burri, however, was intent on addressing what painting (the body) had become. For him, art was an act of rescue and recovery, and purity was never an option."
A monumental expanse of obsidian black splintering before the viewer, obliterating its own image, Alberto Burri’s Nero Cretto from 1976 offers neither picture nor portal, instead exploring the poetics of material degradation in an ingenious act of creative invention. Spanning two and a half meters in width, the incredible monumentality of Nero Cretto invites its spectator to revel in its calamitous surface, scored into thirds as if summoning the format of Renaissance triptychs and altarpieces. Its network of fractures conjures myriad associations with historic and thematic fissures, whether the craquelure which betrays the age of artistic and archeological objects, the ideological and geopolitical schisms to reconstruct the globe in the wake of World War II, or the arid scorched earth of Death Valley, California—where Burri himself spent formative years. Together, the Cretti paintings stand as an epic, unflinching challenge to the supremacy of the picture plane, using the aesthetics and mechanics of destruction to produce a profoundly generative body of work. The present work ranks among the most impressive and dramatic of the Cretti paintings, belonging to a rare and limited group of thirty eight large-scale examples which measure more than one hundred cent.mes ters on both sides. Further test.mes nt to the significance of Nero Cretto, it was prominently exhibited in the landmark 2015-16 retrospective, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and works from the series reside in distinguished international museum collects ions, among them the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
“Burri transmutates rubbish into a metaphor for human, bleeding flesh. He vitalises the dead materials in which he works, makes them live and bleed; then sews up the wounds evocatively and as sensuously as he made them…He is an artist with a scalpel – the surgeon conscious of what lies within the flesh of his compositions and moved by it to the point that he can make the observer also sensitive to it…[Burri] knows and feels with intense visualisation what lies within the fleshy surface of his compositions and [is] and artist who is able to suggest this to the sympathetic observer.”
The 1940s marked the first appearance of cracked paint in Burri’s work, and he introduced the technique used in the Cretti in 1954. It wasn’t until his first Cretto, however, that this device became the sole creative force of his paintings. Embracing modes of experimentation with both his process and pigments, Burri developed a singularly revolutionary method for producing his Cretti, one which allowed him to incorporate elements of the unforeseeable and the aleatory. As in all of Burri’s work, however, the degree of disruption, alteration, destruction, and change were still largely—and miraculously—controlled.
Monumental Black Cretto Paintings in Institutional collects ions
Curator Emily Braun and Carol Stringari analyzes the process behind the present work: “In Nero cretto, Burri took a screwdriver or other sharp instrument and scored deeply into the white paint while it was still wet. He carefully composed a minimal grid composition in a triptych format. The strong vertical and horizontal lines of the scoring insert boundaries that are nonetheless overcome by the more powerful cracks and the slightly concave shapes that lift up like mosaic tesserae … Islands of cleavage narrow to a point the curl upward, giving the impression of instability despite being firmly grounded. The opaque black surface (presumably acrylic) appears to have been sprayed on first, and then brushed or poured to flood the crevices and level the surface, obscuring all traces of white.” (Emily Braun and Carol Stringari quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, 2015, p. 239) In leaving the final flourishes of the work’s gesture to chance, Nero Cretto poses a transatlantic answer to the Minimalist quest in the United States of eliminating the hand of the artist: Burri forfeits his total jurisdiction over the work at the hands of heat and t.mes . The Cretti are thematically linked to Burri’s t.mes in California and the American Southwest. Beginning in the late 1960s, the artist embarked on recurring trips to Death Valley; there, the cracked earth spawned an unshakable visual interest in the radicality of its material identity. “The idea came from [Death Valley],” the artist recalled, “but then in the painting it became something else. I only wanted to demonstrate the energy of a surface.” (the artist quoted in: Giuliano Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan 1999, p. 209) From 1984-89, Burri would return the conceptual genesis of the Cretti to land in his only work of land art: his Grande Cretto in Gibellina, Sicily, a town which was leveled in the 1968 Belice earthquake.
Here, the monochrome onyx field shatters into an unending web of crevices, simultaneously enacting a transformation and degree of trauma unto the work itself. Burri, who was trained as a doctor and spent t.mes in a Texan prisoner of war camp during the Second World War, was no stranger to the upheavals of war during his lifet.mes . To this end, the composition is reminiscent of living flesh – it becomes a sentient surface. t.mes and t.mes again, Burri reminds his viewer that he is the artist of wounds, a title that underscores his place within the canonical narrative of post-war artists who sought to collapse and recalibrate the identity of the painted surface as it had been previously understood. Much like his contemporary Lucio Fontana, and the sharp incisions of his Tagli, Burri radically challenged pre-existing definitions of painting through the purity and subversion of his craquelure. Despite the semblance of dissolution, the fissures hold together, retrofitted with paint: an image of remediation in the face of damage, reconstruction after the world has waged war on itself. “If Titian transformed oil paint into robust flesh, and Georges Seurat turned it into particles of light,” John Yau observed, “World War II turned painting into a permanently torn, scarred and seared body. It is painting’s permanently damaged body that Burri stitched together as well as burned, sewed, cut, hammered, and glued. For him, destruction and creation were inseparable.” (John Yau, “Alberto Burri’s Challenge,” Hyperallergic, 25 October 2015 (online))
An artifact of process, Burri’s Nero Cretto immortalizes the artist’s radical manipulations of matter that would influence generations to come. The magnificent precarity of its absorptive and all-consuming surface is redolent with Burri’s sensitivity to flesh, earth, t.mes , and history: isolating age from image, scar from body, Nero Cretto sees the artist at his very best, breaking art historical precedent to repair a damaged world order. “The painting leads you, it is true,” the artist once reflected, “but at the same t.mes it is always you who leads it. … Allow yourself to be led, by all means, but it is up to you to decide when it is finished.” (the artist in 1955, quoted in: Giuliano Serafini, Burri: La misura e il fenomeno, Milan 1999, p. 225)
