CUBO, Unipol Group Corporate Museum, presents the exhibition "SIRONI-BURRI: an Italian dialogue (1940–1958)" curated by Christian Caliandro. A close dialogue between Mario Sironi's Composizione Murale (c. 1940-1942) and Alberto Burri's Nero con punti (1958), two works belonging to the Unipol Group's artistic heritage that testify to the creative tension behind Italy's reconstruction after the Second World War.
Constructed over years of controversy and opposing demands, these two works account for possible strategies of negotiation with the crisis and transition affecting the country's identity. Sironi's years of maturity coincided with the collapse of the assumptions of mural art and the decision to return to easel painting: in the paintings he produced from the early 1940s until his death in 1961, the urban peripheries would become increasingly dilapidated and ghostly landscapes, while figures and objects would be composed on canvas as wreckage, rubble, the waste of a finished world caught in the attempt to find their own fit and assembly within a completely changed scenario. The Nero con Punti by Burri, on the other hand, avoids any explicit reference to the Italian painting tradition of the 20th century and digs directly into the reality of an eroded present and a distant past: the sacks, made bituminous and sewn together, are both a memory of the immediate post-war period and a rediscovery of the profound, archaic sense of Italian identity, made up of essential poverty, of resigned nakedness. The Sacchi that the artist made during the 1950s are of Franciscan and Giottesque memory and are, at the same time, post-apocalyptic.
The dialogue between Sironi and Burri (presented on the centenary of the latter's birth, celebrated all over the world) provides lively food for thought on a crucial phase of our history. The rediscovery of reality in Italian art and culture between the 1940s and 1950s constitutes the authentic origin of our identity as citizens, a historical memory to be kept alive in order to lay the foundations for tomorrow today.
Collective memory often tends to overlap reconstruction and the economic boom of the late 1950s, despite the fact that they represent two chronologically distinct moments; just as the very idea of the "miracle" and its entire semantic arc perhaps tends to obscure the laborious process that led to the accomplishment of that miracle. Indeed, Italy succeeded in reconstructing a high and effective form of awareness by taking stock of the tragic reality of its past, not by denying it or refusing to consider it for what it was: cultural production bears witness to this enormous collective effort to process the trauma in the making and to reconfigure the foundations of an intangible infrastructure even more important for the country than the physical and material one.
