(Città di Castello/Perugia 1915–1995 Nice)
Nero combustione, 1973, signed and dedicated on the reverse Un Nero Combustione per Costantini Roma Burri 73, acrylic, cardboard, combustion and vinavil on wood panel, 51.3 x 40.8 cm, framed

Photo certificate:
Archivio Fondazione Burri Palazzo Albizzini, Città di Castello, no. 7355

Provenance:
A. Costantini Collection, Rome, acquired from the artist in 1973 and thence by inheritance
Private Collection, Italy

The action Burri exerts on the objects and the materials he encountered has the same biting effect as the unforgiving wear to which time subjects them. And just as the passage of life flows in the immutable direction of death, so does the action performed by Burri – the act of cutting, of harming the material, of suturing, of burning – give rise to fixity and inaction (...).

This is the meaning, in Burri’s work, of the dialectic of shape and shapelessness. His fixed structures seal the regression of actions into stasis, or the resolution of shapelessness into shape (...) in a similar way to how glue fixes the surface of the painting.

(…). The object of his painting is in fact not matter in terms of its organic quantity-quality

(...) but material as an existing thing, available only insofar as it has capacity to receive, to submit to a process that might violate it, but that cannot make it different from what it is.
Burri’s artistic gesture does not draw – it marks.

Maurizio Calvesi quoted in Le due Avanguardie dal Futurismo alla Pop Art, 1966